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Al Jazeera Net correspondents
Gaza- “The daily routine has become an impossible task.” This is how the lives of the residents of the Gaza Strip have become due to the continued aggression of the Israeli occupation, as obtaining simple basic necessities has become impossible.
This reflects the case of citizen Muhammad Abu Khalaf, who despaired of finding a single liter of gasoline to operate a small electric generator, enabling him to raise water to a tank on the roof of his house in the Shaboura refugee camp in the city of Rafah, so he was finally forced to borrow it from his neighbor.
Abu Khalaf and his sons are forced to stand in a long line for more than two hours to fill water from a private well. He tells Al Jazeera Net, “Despite the pain and suffering, we are better off than others. We have a private well in the area from which we buy water, and there are thousands of homes without any source of water.” .
It has become common to see these queues in front of a few water stations, bakeries that are still operating with the remaining fuel they have, or those that operate using solar energy, and in commercial stores that run out of irreplaceable goods, in addition to aspects that emerged with war and siege, such as shipping connections. Free street charge for batteries and mobile phones.
The rest of these service facilities were not spared from the Israeli air strikes, as the occupation raids hit bakeries that were crowded with queues of people looking for bread, and in markets and shops, and hundreds of martyrs and wounded died as a result.
Meanwhile, municipalities in the southern Gaza Strip said that the occupation, which claims that “the southern regions are safe” and is pushing the residents of Gaza and its north to migrate there, targets and destroys water wells there.
Abu Khalaf’s experience is not exceptional for more than two million Palestinians, who face many complications affecting the details of their daily lives, since the beginning of the occupation’s aggression, which was accompanied by an applied blockade under which Israel prevents all means of life from the sector that the occupation is pushing against.The years go back.
A martyr without blood
Abu Anas (from the “Abu Hamra” family) paid with his life for the complications resulting from the war and the siege, and according to what his family told Al Jazeera Net, he died about a week ago, after he continued to suffer all night from symptoms of a stroke that he suffered, and his wife and daughters’ attempts to contact an ambulance were unsuccessful. To take him to the hospital.
In the morning hours, the ambulance arrived, but fate rushed the man on his way to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, from which he was forced to flee, after a personal call from an Israeli officer asking him to evacuate his home in the southern Al-Rimal neighborhood, which is one of the city’s neighborhoods whose features changed due to the raids it received. Intense weather.
Abu Anas’s family and those close to him believe that he is a “martyr”, and if he did not bleed as a result of the occupation’s missiles and shells, he bled in “pain and suffering”, as if he could not bear the tragedies of the few days he spent as a refugee in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
This seventy-year-old man – according to his family and friends – worked for years as an engineer in a Gulf country, and returned to Gaza to work for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and he always refused to evacuate his home, and has held on since the first war on Gaza in 2008 and the wars that followed. He stayed in the 14-storey tower he lived in, and was not affected by the displacement of his neighbors, until the last of the displaced was forced out.
Scarce aid
Perhaps Abu Anas needed an ambulance that stopped because it ran out of fuel, and others were also dying in their homes or under their rubble and in hospitals, for similar reasons, as a result of the occupation’s insistence on refusing to include fuel as part of the aid, which it allowed to enter through the Rafah land crossing with Egypt, and with many “restrictions.” And the requirements.”
Even the liter of fuel that Abu Khalaf was looking for required the Ministry of Health to issue an “urgent appeal” to every citizen who owns a similar one to take it to Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the Strip that bears the greatest burden of the war, to ensure the continuity of its work, amid warnings that it has entered a “stage.” “Countdown” to go out of service.
In this context, the Director-General of the Ministry of Health, Dr. Mounir Al-Barsh, described to Al-Jazeera Net the medical aid that arrived in the Gaza Strip as “a drop in the ocean of our needs,” and it includes a few trucks for the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization.
According to Al-Barsh, UNICEF needed special coordination and technical monitoring of the route of its aid trucks, to enable it to reach Al-Shifa Hospital exclusively, and not to the warehouses of the Ministry of Health, while the rest of the scarce aid was limited to its distribution in areas south of the Gaza Strip.
Under the tripartite Egyptian-American-Israeli agreement, 291 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip – via the Rafah crossing – including only 10 trucks for the Ministry of Health, which included “shrouds for men, women and children,” in addition to bandages made of medical gauze and cotton, according to Al-Borsh’s confirmation.
He asked with great astonishment, “Are these our priorities and basic needs in light of the emergency circumstances?” Al-Barsh answered himself, saying, “We urgently need anesthetics, respirators, operating rooms, orthopedic and neurosurgical tools, and many other devices and medications to deal with war victims.” The bloody Israeli attack on Gaza.
