Israeli bombs frighten Gaza

As Israeli bombs began to rain on Gaza, Najla Shawa, a Palestinian humanitarian worker, invented a game to ward off terrified six- and four-year-old girls.

“We gather in the corridor and hug them and tell them loudly about the explosions together,” he said from a home scarred from the strained war between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. “In the first round of the bombing they screamed and screamed, and the eldest started complaining of chest pains. He could not sit or eat because of his body’s fear and tension. “

Trapped in the narrow coastal territory, with its borders closed, the civilian population of Gaza – about 2 million people, most of them refugees from previous wars – have nowhere to flee. Israel has built the enclave using turnkey planes, warships and tanks, and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, has fired thousands of rockets at the Jewish state, though most have been captured. Israeli air defense system.

As of Sunday, 192 people had been killed in Gaza, including 92 women and children, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military said there were at least 75 Hamas militants, but no evidence was provided. So far, 10 people have been killed inside Israel, including two children and a soldier.

The death toll in Gaza is expected to rise, as many will still be trapped under the rubble. On Sunday morning alone, Israeli airstrikes killed 42 people and several buildings collapsed. A witness said rescuers, using their hands and rough levers, made an effort to twist the wounded into metal and pull them out of heavy concrete.

Some of the survivors of ambulances and airstrikes on nearby roads had to take their children to receive medical help. A resident of an apartment block who asked not to be named said they had not received an evacuation warning before the knock.

He stressed that Israel is targeting militants and accused Hamas of hiding behind Palestinian civilians. But his army is using a greater pace and intensity of airstrikes against a wider range of targets than in previous campaigns, according to a new military strategy called the “doctrine of victory”. Israeli Defense Force Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said there were 160 planes in an hour-long operation Thursday night.

The IDF said the houses that were destroyed on Sunday collapsed after airstrikes pulled out a network of nearby Hamas tunnels, damaging their foundations.

Gaza is one of the most populous places in the world and while Hamas fighters can retreat to the tunnels – the group has dug under Gaza’s main cities, towns and refugee camps to prevent airstrikes and facilitate communication – civilians have little room to hide. .

A Palestinian man described how the building inhabited by his extended family of 30 was rocked from side to side when Israeli shells fell around him. They fled at dawn on Friday after being hit by a nearby home.

“I later heard from neighbors that an entire family, father, mother and four children were buried under the rubble,” he said.

More than 10,000 people have been taken to the shelter in schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. Among them, Ahmed Arafat, a farmer in northeastern Beit Hanoun in Gaza, said on Friday morning that he and his wife, mother and five children were fleeing escapes from Israeli tanks. During the seven-week war of 2014 — the last major conflict between Israel and Hamas — his family spent a month in a similar shelter. “This time I don’t know when it will end,” he added. “But I’m afraid it will last a long time.”

The Gaza Strip – paired by human rights groups with an open-air prison – has been blocked in Israel and Egypt since 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah, a political faction led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As trade and access to the outside world were so limited, the exhausted and poor people of Gaza had already seen their infrastructure crumbled and their standard of living deteriorated before the last battles began.

“Every couple of years there is a conflict of magnitude in Gaza that leaves the blockade even more desperate and destitute than before,” Tamara al-Rifaik told UNRWA. “The already weak health infrastructure must also fight Covid-19.”

The supply of electricity and fresh water, already intermittent from time to time, is in crisis because fuel is no longer entering. The only power plant in Gaza would run out of fuel by Monday ceasefire it was negotiated to supply it, an Israeli official said.

Ashraf al-Qudra of the Gaza Ministry of Health said they expect fuels to operate in hospital generators within a week, adding to the pressure on facilities already facing the flood of injured civilians. More than 1,200 people were injured.

“We are treating second- and third-degree burns, people with broken bodies and others who are suffering from drowning from poisonous smoke,” he added. “Since the injuries are life-threatening, they are life-threatening and require surgical interventions that we cannot perform in Gaza. We must open the crossings to Israel because they provide rescue for the necessary medicines, hospital supplies, food and fuel generators.”

Hamas, the Islamic movement, rules Gaza with an iron fist, but there is still no one to blame the Palestinians for the latest suffering. Abbas, the Palestinian president, canceled the elections scheduled for last month out of fear that Hamas would win.

Shawa said his family was watching black smoke on Black Gas. Her husband left his house by the sea in western Gaza only once since the bombing began to take bread. He described the mood in the territory after years of blockade: “People feel like they have nothing to lose and are disgusted with this great injustice.”