‘Pushed to the brink,’ Gaza evacuees face bombs, blackouts

Sherihan al-Bayyari fled from her home in Gaza City, with her husband and six children, two weeks ago, when Israel ordered residents of the town to seek safety further south in the Gaza Strip.

With nowhere else to go, she is now living in a school classroom with 60 other evacuees, her family space marked off by lines of laundry – unwashed for lack of water. And essential supplies are running short.

“There is no water at all. Can you imagine I haven’t had a drop of water since morning?” Ms. Bayyari says. Like many other mothers, she is feeding her children plain flatbread – an empty sandwich – for their main meal.

“At night I sleep on a school desk,” she says, complaining that she and tens of thousands of families like hers are being “pushed to the brink.”

“We cannot endure these inhumane conditions. There is no dignity,” she adds. “If this situation continues, it will be an absolute disaster.”

Meanwhile, Israeli jets and tanks pounded Rafah and neighboring areas of southern Gaza with an intensified barrage. Missiles and tank shells exploded almost every minute for extended periods on Thursday as the Israeli government turned down calls for a “humanitarian pause.”

Muezzins who normally call the faithful to prayer now tell them over loudspeakers to pray at home because moving in the streets is too dangerous. They also name the day’s deceased and ask residents to pray for them. “Death has never felt closer,” said one young Palestinian woman as the ground shook beneath her feet.

Very limited convoys of food and medicine continued to trickle into Gaza on Thursday, but as fuel shortages shut down water pumps, bakeries, and hospitals – and curtailed aid delivery – United Nations officials and local residents said the humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave is rapidly deteriorating.

“The aid delivered to Gaza so far is barely making a dent. We need more, and we need it now. We need it to include fuel,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council earlier this week.

“Without fuel, our humanitarian operation will stop. No fuel means no hospitals functioning, no desalination of water, and no baking,” he warned. Many evacuees in southern Gaza reported that their water supplies had run out on Wednesday. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said its fuel supplies, which it had been sharing with other U.N. agencies, were exhausted as of Thursday evening and that it was halting life-saving services.

Stampedes for water

The Israeli authorities have refused to allow the entry of fuel on the grounds that Hamas militants might steal it; U.N. officials say is critical to maintain minimum living conditions. Amid a Gaza-wide blackout, UNWRA, the leading humanitarian agency in Gaza, said Wednesday it would be forced to suspend its services late Thursday.

A convoy of 12 trucks carrying food, medicine, and sanitary wipes entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing from Egypt on Thursday. They brought about 2% of the goods imported each day prior to the current war and Israel’s imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip, home to 2.2 million people.

That move followed a harrowing attack by Hamas militants on Israeli civilians in a surprise raid on Oct. 7 that left 1,400 Israelis dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

As of Thursday afternoon, Israel’s bombardment had destroyed or damaged nearly 50% of homes in the Gaza Strip, and killed more than 7,000 people, including 2,900 children, according to Palestinian health officials.

For the time being, U.N. agencies are handing out small amounts of humanitarian aid, but only in the far south of the strip, where hundreds of thousands of evacuees are sheltering in packed private homes, hospitals, and schools. And distribution is disorderly, residents say.

This week, trucks have delivered canned tuna, canned beef, soup, bread, jam, tissue paper, and soap to the school where Ms. Bayyari is sheltering with her family. Families as large as 10 people were issued with a single 12 oz. can of corned beef or a 6 oz. can of tuna to share among them.

The arrival of a water truck at the school sparks a near stampede, Ms. Bayyari says, as hundreds of people race with yellow jerry cans to communal tanks to fill up whatever they can. Earlier this week, she was not one of the lucky ones who were handed mattresses and blankets. There were not enough to go around, she says.

“Alive, but far from OK”

Hiba Mahmoud says she has been in a race for survival since an Israeli missile strike destroyed her family compound at the Bureij refugee camp in the heart of Gaza City, killing several of her young nieces and nephews.

Ms. Mahmoud and her husband, both dentists, and their three children of ages between 2 and 10, first sought refuge at an UNRWA school in the camp, along with 20 other relatives. But as thousands more people crowded into the school and its grounds, they overwhelmed the sanitary facilities; living conditions became unbearable, according to Ms. Mahmoud.

Three days ago, she and her family left the school to seek refuge at her sister’s home in Rafah, which is also packed with evacuees and has little water.

“We barely have any access to water,” Ms. Mahmoud says, “We constantly urge our children to ration every drop. We simply don’t have enough. Every night I spend here, I fear contracting a disease.”

For a brief moment, she has access to the internet on her phone. She takes advantage of the opportunity to send a simple Facebook message to her parents in Germany: “I am alive, but far from OK.”

The U.N. World Food Program warns that fuel, food, and water supplies are running low, and that of the 24 bakeries it supplies with flour, only four were operating as of Thursday and were expected to shutter once their generators ran out of fuel. 

The overwhelming majority of Gaza’s shops and bakeries have closed, however; at the few vegetable stands still open, shoppers queue to buy locally grown onions and sweet peppers, picked before the war or, on rare occasions, local green apples and seasonal dates.

Despite the constant risk of missile strikes and the fact that he has little left to sell in his unlit supermarket, Jamal Abu Taha comes in each day to open the Al Nour Market.

When electricity supplies to Rafah were cut off last week amid a Gaza-wide blackout due to the lack of fuel, Mr. Abu Taha gave away all the perishable items he had left in his refrigerators, including chickens, yogurt, cheeses, and milk, to residents in need.

Today, what was once Rafah’s largest supermarket is down to its last few dry goods.

The near-bare shelves are scattered with the odd container of powdered milk; walnuts; bags of lentils, chickpeas, and pasta; and a few cans of beef and tuna. Mr. Abu Taha’s last sack of sugar sits on an otherwise empty shelf.

“We are on the brink of water and fuel crises,” he says, “and now a food crisis.”

The wholesale warehouses on which shops like his rely are completely empty, Mr. Abu Taha and other grocers report. And when he runs out of goods altogether?

“That’s it,” he says. “God only knows what is next.”