Israeli bombs scare Gaza

When Israeli bombs began raining on Gaza, Najla Shawa, a Palestinian humanitarian worker, devised a game to distract her terrified six- and four-year-old girls.

“We gather in the hallway and I hug them and together we count out loud the explosions,” he said from his home on the strip marked between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. “During the first round of bombings they screamed and screamed, and the eldest began to complain of chest pains. I could not sit or eat because of the fear and tension of my body.

Trapped in the narrow coastal territory, with its sealed borders, the civilian population of Gaza (about 2 million people, mostly refugees from previous wars), has nowhere to flee. Israel has hit the enclave with fighter jets, warships and tanks, while Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, has launched thousands of rudimentary rockets at the Jewish state, though most have been intercepted by the Israeli air defense system.

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

The death toll in Gaza is expected to rise, and many will still be trapped under the rubble. On Sunday morning alone, Israeli airstrikes killed 42 people and collapsed several buildings. Rescuers, with their hands and rudimentary levers, struggled to pull the wounded out of the twisted metal and heavy concrete, a witness said.

The shortage of ambulances and airstrikes on nearby roads meant that some survivors had to take their young children for medical help. A resident of an apartment block, who asked not to be named, said he had not received any evacuation warnings before being beaten.

Israel insists it is targeting militant positions and has accused Hamas of hiding behind Palestinian civilians. But its military is deploying a higher pace and intensity of airstrikes against a wider range of targets than in previous campaigns, under a new military strategy called the “victory doctrine.” Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus of the Israeli Defense Forces said a one-hour operation Thursday night involved 160 planes.

IDF said residential buildings that were destroyed on Sunday had collapsed after airstrikes pulled a network of nearby Hamas tunnels, damaging their foundations.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world, and while Hamas fighters can retreat into the tunnels — dug by the group under Gaza’s major cities, towns and refugee camps to help evade airstrikes and facilitate communication. -, civilians have few places to hide.

A Palestinian described how the building in which his extended family of 30 people had lived had swayed from side to side as Israeli shells fell nearby. They fled Friday morning after a nearby home was run over.

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

More than 10,000 people have taken refuge in schools run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. Among them, Ahmed Arafat, a farmer in Beit Hanoun, northeastern Gaza, said he fled with his wife, mother and five children early Friday to escape Israeli tank bombings. During the seven-week war of 2014, the last major conflict between Israel and Hamas, his family had spent a month in a similar shelter. “I don’t know when it will end this time,” he added. “But I’m afraid it will last a long time.”

The Gaza Strip, often compared to an open-air prison by human rights groups, has been blocked by Israel and Egypt since 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah, the political faction led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. With trade and access to the outside world severely restricted, Gaza’s depleted and impoverished population had already seen its infrastructure collapse and living standards collapse before the last fighting began.

“Every two years there is a conflict of magnitude in Gaza that leaves it even more desperate and destitute than before due to the ongoing blockade,” Tamara al-Rifai told UNRWA. “Now the health infrastructure that is already weak also has to fight with Covid-19.”

The supply of energy and fresh water, already intermittent in normal times, are in crisis because fuel no longer enters. Gaza’s only power plant would run out of fuel on Monday unless stop the fire was negotiated to allow the supply, an Israeli official said.

Ashraf al-Qudra, of Gaza’s health ministry, said he expected fuel to run hospital generators to run out in less than a week, adding to pressure on facilities that they are already facing a flood of wounded civilians. More than 1,200 people have been injured.

“We are dealing with second and third degree burns, people with broken limbs and others suffering from suffocation of poisonous fumes,” he added. “The injuries range from dangerous to fatal and need surgery that we cannot carry out in Gaza. We need to open the way to Israel because they provide a lifeline of necessary medicines, hospital supplies, food and fuel for to the generators ”.

Hamas, an Islamist movement, rules Gaza with an iron fist, but there is still no evidence that the Palestinians are blaming the group for the latest suffering. Abbas, the Palestinian president, canceled the elections scheduled for last month in a move considered largely motivated by fears that Hamas would win.

Shawa said his family was seeing black smoke over the Gaza skyline. Her husband had left her home near the sea in western Gaza only once since the bombing began to get bread. Describing the mood in the territory after years of blockade, he said: “People feel they have nothing to lose and are fed up with this great injustice.”