‘The ground is shaking’ in southern Gaza. Is anywhere safe?
By Ghada Abdulfattah and Taylor Luck
RAFAH, GAZA STRIP; AND DUBAI, UAE- As Israel’s military campaign pushes further south in Gaza, and Israel and Hamas engage in urban warfare, Palestinian residents say they are left with nowhere to go.
Reeling from the dashed hopes for an extended cease-fire, Gaza Palestinians say they are now under siege like never before – isolated from family members they can no longer contact and trapped in a rotation of neighborhoods as the Israeli army’s push cuts off one residential block from another.
With the Israeli army dropping evacuation order leaflets in Khan Yunis and elsewhere in southern Gaza – to which Israel instructed 1.2 million people to evacuate at the start of the war – Gaza Palestinians no longer know where to turn, where to find shelter, or if they will survive the night.
In the southernmost town of Rafah, dozens of displaced families and individuals are living in the streets, scrambling for makeshift shelter as Israeli drones buzz overhead.
As of Thursday, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza had displaced 1.93 million Palestinians, or 86% of the strip’s population, according to the United Nations, and killed more than 17,000 people, Gaza officials say.
On Friday the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution, sponsored by the United Arab Emirates, demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire. The vote on the resolution was 13 to 1, with Britain abstaining.
In southern Gaza, shelter is extremely scarce.
At Rafah’s Duwwar Al-Awda roundabout, or “circle of return,” located 500 yards from the Egypt-Gaza border, dozens of men, women, and children resorted to lying on collapsed cardboard boxes on the street under the open sky. They clutched themselves, hoping that no artillery shelling or airstrikes hit nearby.
At the UNRWA flour distribution center in Rafah, thousands of people stood outside Friday waiting to get a 25-kilogram sack of flour. But the United Nations said its aid distribution has halted in the rest of the strip.
Complicating matters: Communications are down in large swaths of southern Gaza as part of Israel’s military campaign, adding to the worries of families split up and spread out across the southern half of the coastal enclave. Most do not know the fate of their children, parents, or siblings just a few miles away.
The epicenter of the fighting, bombardment, and chaos is in Khan Yunis, where Israel’s ground operation entered its eighth day since the collapse of the cease-fire, and where Israeli forces engaged in house-to-house combat with Hamas. Khan Yunis is the hometown of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and Israel says Hamas officials and battalions are based in tunnels beneath the city.
“We can’t sleep; my hand shakes”
Reena Abu Nahla and her two children were among the thousands caught in the fighting and unrelenting bombing in eastern Khan Yunis.
They had returned to their family home in the Maan neighborhood of Khan Yunis on the first day of the cease-fire late last month in the hopes the lull in fighting would last and they would remain relatively safe.
Now the ground beneath them quakes nonstop, and explosions nearby have continued since the first airstrike in the area minutes after the cease-fire collapsed last Friday.
“The ground is shaking; there are nonstop airstrikes. We can’t sleep; my hand shakes,” Ms. Abu Nahla says. “I hold my two children in my lap at night. Every time there is a loud explosion, I hug them tightly.”
At night, Gaza’s skies turn red and orange as if on fire. “The smell of gunpowder is very strong; it is everywhere. There are nonstop rings of fire,” Ms. Abu Nahla says………CONTINUE READING AT THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR