2023-10-12 01:52:34
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Screams fill the hallways. The air carries a bad smell. The wounded pass through the door incessantly. Lifeless bodies and bags full of limbs that arrive in sheets.
The images at Shifa Hospital are a grotesque reflection of the chaos that surrounds it.
The explosions shook central Gaza City as workers mopped up blood and relatives took children with shrapnel wounds to the operating room.
For the past five days, Israeli warplanes have bombed the besieged strip with an intensity never before seen by its war-accustomed residents. The airstrikes have left more than 1,100 Palestinians dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Authorities have not detailed how many of the dead are civilians, but aid workers warn that Israel’s decision to impose a “total siege” on the territory of 2.3 million inhabitants is giving rise to a humanitarian catastrophe that affects almost to each and every one of them.
The bombings have transformed entire neighborhoods into a vast expanse of rubble with bodies scattered everywhere. There is no clean water. And darkness takes over everything, since the only electricity generation plant in the territory ran out of fuel on Wednesday, so they only have generators that will not last long.
“It is an unprecedented extent of destruction,” said Miriam Marmur, spokesperson for Gisha, an Israeli human rights group. “Israeli decisions to cut off supplies of electricity, fuel, food and medicine exacerbate the risks for Palestinians and threaten to greatly increase the loss of human life.”
Israeli bombing has intensified in response to Hamas’ unprecedented incursion into several parts of Israel on Saturday. Israel’s military claims that more than 1,200 people were killed and dozens more were kidnapped, prompting the government to declare war, promising to carry out a devastating campaign to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities.
But Palestinians say Israel has unleashed its fury primarily on civilians, a population that has lived for the past 16 years under a crippling blockade imposed by Israel and has survived four devastating wars and other hostilities.
The attacks in different parts of Gaza, from agricultural villages on the northern border to the luxurious towers in the heart of Gaza City, have claimed the lives of 171 women and at least 326 children, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported. Eight journalists have died, according to local media, in addition to six doctors, according to reports from the Palestinian Red Crescent. The United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East assures that among the dead are 11 agency workers.
In past wars, news of a single affected neighborhood might shake the international community. This time around, Israeli strikes are rapidly destroying large swathes of Gaza, and the death toll is piling up so fast that it’s hard to keep track.
“In previous escalations, there was always a time, even half an hour, when there were no airstrikes,” said Nebal Farsakh, spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent. “But now not a single minute passes. That is why the number of victims does not stop increasing.”
The toll is palpable in Gaza’s hospitals.
Even in ordinary times, supplies are insufficient. Now, the shortage covers everything from bandages and intravenous fluids to beds and essential medicines, said Richard Brennan, regional director of the World Health Organization.
“It can hardly get any worse,” Brennan said. “It’s not just the damage, the destruction. It’s that psychological pressure. The constant bombings, the loss of colleagues.”
One of the largest hospitals in the territory, in Bait Hanun, was bombed and rendered inoperative. Shrapnel has hit seven other United Nations hospitals and 10 emergency shelters, according to the WHO and the UN.
At Shifa Hospital, doctors have trouble keeping the place running. Fuel supplies run out and chaos breaks out outside. Women and children, some of them barefoot, took to the streets with their belongings amid the explosions.
From the hospital corridor, Muhammad Al-Gharabli recalled how the impact of four missiles last Monday once morest a mosque in the Shati refugee camp decapitated his 2-year-old son, Mohammed, and left shrapnel wounds in his son’s leg. 5 years, Lofti.
Al-Gharabli said that when he came to, he saw dozens of bodies scattered over the ruins of their homes. He recognized the blood-covered face of his neighbor, an auto mechanic.
“The horror doesn’t let me sleep,” he declared.
In many cases, residents say, the Israeli armed forces have bombed residential buildings without the usual warning shots, wiping out entire families inside their homes. Israel claims it only goes following military targets and does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, a claim the Palestinians refute.
The Gaza Health Ministry has reported, without releasing details, 22 incidents in which airstrikes have killed multiple members of the same family. The Israeli military rarely comments on individual bombings.
For the Bureji refugee camp, a densely populated place in central Gaza, the chaos began early Wednesday. Jaber Weshah said there was no warning before an attack destroyed the adjacent building.
Few survived. Some people were still trapped under the rubble, waiting for hours for ambulances to arrive, Weshah said.
That attack left 12 dead, residents indicated. Among the deceased were a bookseller, his wife and his two young daughters; a landlord, his son and his disabled sister; and six members of a single family, of which only the patriarch survived.
“It was hell,” said Weshah, a 73-year-old human rights activist. “If they are trying to confront Hamas, I understand, they can do it. But they have the best military technology and they can’t tell who is civilian and who is not?
When Israel bombed the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, it killed at least 50 people — including two entire families — and much of the camp was destroyed, health authorities and residents reported. The Israeli military said the targets it hit “were solely directed at Hamas tactical rooms and operational apartments.”
One of those families were the Masouds — two public school teachers and their children, ages 12 and 10 — according to their neighbor, Khalil Abu Yahia.
“They would sacrifice their lives to take care of their children,” he said, referring to the parents, Alaa and Atallah.
The morning of the attack, the four family members took shelter in a room, away from the windows.
Abu Yahia knows this because, he said, that is how they found the four bodies.
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DeBre reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Julia Frankel contributed to this report.
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