100 days into the Gaza war: a devastated area and morgues full of dead families
A hundred days have passed since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas that reduced the Gaza Strip to rubble, with entire neighborhoods left in ruins, a collapsed health system, and morgues filled with dead families and terror-stricken citizens.
“It's only been a hundred days, but it feels like a hundred years,” says Abdel Aziz Sadat, in a new camp in the town of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip. Sadat, like the majority of Gazans, left his home. In his tent, he feels bitterly cold at night.
The war left its imprint on the small coastal region of 2.4 million people. Its surroundings, once bustling with traffic and cars, are now littered with rubble and destroyed buildings.
“Some live in schools, others sleep on the streets, on the floor or on chairs,” says Sadat. War saved nothing.
About 1.9 million people, representing 85 percent of the besieged area's population, were displaced from their homes, according to United Nations figures.
“A Place of Death and Despair”
Martin Griffiths, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, described the Gaza Strip as “simply unlivable…a place of death and despair.”
Gazans are trying to hold on as long as they can, and only a few hundred of them have managed to leave the sector, which has been under siege by Israel since 2007, which was tightened after the war broke out after Hamas took control of it. .
Israel vowed to “destroy” Hamas after the movement launched an unprecedented offensive in the south of the Hebrew state on October 7 that led to the deaths of some 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to Agence France-Presse. Journal based on Israeli official statistics. About 250 hostages were also taken during the attack, 132 of whom are still being held in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said.
Israel responded with violent aerial and artillery bombardment, and on October 27, began ground operations in the Gaza Strip, killing 23,469 people, most of them women and children, and injuring around 60,000, while thousands more were injured. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health are still buried under the rubble. “Hamas”.
The blast left craters in refugee camps and roads, and damaged schools, universities, mosques and public facilities.
Israel accuses Hamas of using people from mosques, schools and hospitals as human shields, charges Hamas denies.
Mass destruction
Two American university professors, Camon van den Hoek and Corey Scher, concluded based on satellite images that as of January 5, 45 to 56 percent of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed or damaged.
The destruction was “very widespread, it was very rapid,” Cory Shear said, noting that the scale of the damage was “similar to the destruction that occurred in the most vulnerable areas of the bombing in Ukraine.”
A study by the United Nations Satellite Center found that 18 percent of buildings had been destroyed or damaged after 50 days of fighting.
The end of the fighting does not mean that residents of the Gaza Strip will be able to return to their homes; Reconstruction can be a difficult process that requires a lot of effort.
Archaeological sites and important landmarks in the Gaza Strip were attacked, notably the destruction of the Al-Omari Mosque, the area's oldest mosque, among the narrow, intricate alleys in the historic center of Gaza City.
Graves were filled with the dead, and they were buried in mass graves dug in orchards, hospital yards and a soccer field, journalists at Agence France-Presse said.
As the days went by, the same scene: men and women wailing as they recognized bodies wrapped in white plastic sheets, names written in black ink.
According to Rick Peppercorn, the World Health Organization's representative in the Palestinian territories, if the wounded can reach one of the 15 partially serviced hospitals out of 36, they find a different kind of “battlefield.”
In the hospitals he was able to visit, he described “chaos,” “bloodstains on the floor,” and the screams of the wounded, sometimes waiting days before receiving treatment. He noted that some operating rooms were lit up by mobile phones. Electrical shocks, and surgeries are sometimes performed without anesthesia.
A representative of the World Health Organization said: “Almost all medical equipment has a malfunction,” adding: “I have never seen this number of amputations in my lifetime.”
“People are starving”
“We have lost hope,” says Ibrahim Sadat, who moved to Rafah: “There is no water, no electricity, we shower only once a month because of the lack of water. Our psychological state is tired and sick.” spread everywhere.”
According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), cases of diarrhea among children rose from 48,000 cases to 71,000 within a week last month, compared to 2,000 cases a month before the war.
Corinne Fleischer, the World Food Programme's regional director, warned: “In 30 years, I have never seen food shortages of this magnitude.”
He told Agence France-Presse: “Food production has completely stopped and people can't go to their fields or fish in the sea, especially because of the bombing of the Gaza port,” where fishermen unloaded their fish every day.
As for agricultural lands, they are inaccessible.
Many bakeries were damaged or closed due to lack of fuel. Desperate residents boarded aid trucks in search of food, journalists from the French newspaper said.
“The shops are empty, there's nothing to eat,” Fleischer said: “People are starving.”
Hadeel Shehada (age 23), who lives in a tent in the town of Rafah (south), expresses the frustration of the young people who make up half of the Strip's population. He says: “All our dreams are gone.. . Years of our lives are gone.”
