By Isabel Debre, GAZA
CITY, Gaza
Hallways filled with screaming
voices. A terrible stench in the air. Wounded people streaming through the
doors. Lifeless bodies and bags of body parts arriving in bedsheets.Palestinians remove a dead body from the rubble of a building after an Israeli airstrike Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 9, 2023.
The scene at Shifa Hospital
was a grisly reflection of the chaos around it. Even as workers mopped up blood
and relatives rushed children with shrapnel wounds into surgery, explosions
thundered in central Gaza City.
Over the last five days, Israeli warplanes have pummeled the blockaded strip with an intensity
that its war-weary residents had never experienced. The airstrikes have killed
over 1,100 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Officials have
not said how many civilians are among the dead, but aid workers warn that Israel’s decision to impose a “complete
siege” on the crowded enclave of 2.3 million people is spawning a humanitarian
catastrophe that touches nearly every one of them.
The airstrikes have
transformed lively neighborhoods into wastelands of rubble strewn with bodies.
There is no clean water. And there is darkness — the territory’s only power
plant ran out of fuel Wednesday, leaving only generators that won’t last long.
“This is an unprecedented scope of
destruction,” said Miriam Marmur, a spokeswoman for Gisha, an Israeli human
rights group. “Israeli decisions to cut electricity, fuel, food and medicine
supplies severely compound the risks to Palestinians and threaten to greatly increase
the toll in human life.”Palestinians, including some journalists, carry the bodies of two Palestinian reporters, Mohammed Soboh and Said al-Tawil, who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023
The
Israeli bombardment has
escalated in retaliation for Hamas militants’ unprecedented multifront attack Saturday. The Israeli military says more than
1,200 were killed and dozens more abducted, and the government declared war,
promising a punishing campaign to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities.
But Palestinians say Israel
has largely unleashed that fury on civilians — a population that has lived for
16 years under a crippling blockade imposed by Israel and through four
devastating wars and other hostilities.
The strikes across Gaza, from
its farming villages on the northern border to upmarket towers in the heart of
Gaza City, have killed 171 women and at least 326 people under 18, the Gaza
Health Ministry said. Eight journalists have been killed, local media organizations
said, and six medics, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. The U.N.
agency for Palestinian refugees reports 11 of its staffers among the dead.
During past wars, news of a
single shattered neighborhood could shake the international community. This
time, Israeli airstrikes are rapidly laying waste to vast swaths of Gaza, and
casualties are mounting too fast for anyone to keep up.
“In previous escalations,
there would always be some time, even a half-hour, without airstrikes,” said
Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent. “But now, there
is not a single minute. That’s why the casualties keep going up and up.”
The stark toll is palpable at
Gaza hospitals.
Even in ordinary times,
they’re poorly supplied. Now, there’s a shortage of everything from bandages to
intravenous fluids, beds to essential drugs, said Richard Brennan, regional
director of the World Health Organization.
“It’s almost as bad as it
gets,” Brennan said. “It’s not just the damage, the destruction. It’s that psychological
pressure. The constant shelling ... the loss of one’s colleagues.”
An airstrike hit one of the territory’s biggest hospitals, in northern Beit Hanoun, rendering it inoperable. Shrapnel has flown into seven other hospitals and 10 U.N. emergency shelters, according to the World Health Organization and United Nations.
At Shifa Hospital, doctors
battled to keep the place running. Fuel supplies ran low, and panic ensued
outside. As explosions crashed, women and children streamed into the streets
with their belongings, some of them barefoot.
From the hospital corridor,
Muhammad Al-Gharabli recalled four missiles crashing into a mosque in the
seaside Shati refugee camp Monday, decapitating his 2-year-old son, Mohammed,
and sending shrapnel into the leg of his 5-year-old son, Lotfi.
Al-Gharabli said that when he
regained consciousness, he saw the bodies of dozens of neighbors strewn over
the ruins of their homes. He recognized the still and bloodied face of his
next-door neighbor, a car mechanic.
“I can’t sleep from the
horror,” he said.
In many cases, residents say,
the Israeli military has bombed apartment towers without the usual warning
shots, wiping out families in their homes. Israel says it is going after only
militant targets and does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties — a claim the
Palestinians reject.
The Gaza Health Ministry has
reported 22 incidents in which airstrikes have killed many members of the same
extended family, without providing details. The Israeli military rarely
comments on individual airstrikes.
For the densely populated
Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, the mayhem began early Wednesday. Jaber
Weshah said there was no warning when a strike pummeled the multistory building
next door.
Few survived. Some people
remained trapped under the rubble, awaiting ambulances for hours, Weshah said.
The death toll from that
strike reached 12, residents said. Among the dead was a bookseller, his wife
and two toddler daughters; a landlord, his son and his disabled sister; and six
members of one family, leaving only its patriarch.
“It was an inferno,” said
Weshah, a 73-year-old human rights activist. “If you’re trying to confront
Hamas, I get it, you can do that. But you have the best military technology and
you can’t differentiate between who is a civilian and who is not?”
When Israeli airstrikes
pounded Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, at least 50 people — including
two entire families — were killed and much of the camp razed, health
authorities and residents said. The Israeli miliary said that the targets it
struck “were only directed at Hamas situation rooms and operational
apartments.”
One of the families killed
were the Masouds — two public schoolteachers and their sons, ages 12 and 10 —
according to neighbor Khalil Abu Yahia.
“They would sacrifice their
lives to care for their children,” he said of parents Alaa and Atallah.
The morning of the strike, the
family of four huddled close in the one room, far from the windows.
Abu Yahia knows this, he said,
because that’s how all four bodies were found.
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