Israeli strikes pounded a Gaza refugee camp on Friday following a deadly attack on a UN-run school, as the war triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented assault on Israel entered its ninth month. The conflict has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, devastated much of the Gaza Strip, displaced most of its 2.4 million residents, and left them facing the threat of starvation.
In the densely populated Nuseirat camp, where more than a dozen people were killed in the predawn attack on the al-Sardi School run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, it took hours for relatives and neighbours to pull the bodies from the rubble. A video posted on social media showed children’s bodies lying in the classrooms, some wrapped in white shrouds.
It’s one of many scenes of despair across Gaza. Families of the dead have gathered in hospitals, waiting to be told when they can come home. Survivors are living in tents or overcrowded, crumbling U.N-run shelters, and doctors say there is no way to keep the hospital’s medical wards functioning at full capacity. Electricity is being rationed as staff struggle to cope with the constant demand for treatment, with patients massing in hallways.
Hundreds of Gazans have been displaced, some into the densely crowded border town of Rafah on Egypt’s border, others into neighbouring communities and still more into overflowing refugee camps set up by the United Nations. Israeli officials have said they will only allow Gazans to return if their security can be guaranteed. But that hasn’t stopped them from announcing plans to expel those in areas they consider “offensive”.
Israel says its military has pushed Hamas back and that it is now in a position to end the war. But the conflict’s human cost is almost incomprehensible. According to a new study by mapping experts at Oregon State University, nearly half of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed, and more than 60 per cent are considered beyond repair.
The damage has left a quarter of the population at risk of starvation, according to the United Nations. And just 15 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are fully operational, leaving them unable to meet the vast needs.
The United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, has called for an end to the fighting. He has also urged Israel to be “fully transparent” in sharing information about the strikes that have targeted civilians, including its naming of those killed. But the US, which gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid every year, has said it expects its ally to respect international legal obligations. This stance leaves humanitarian workers, including those from the United Nations, at risk. They are facing delays and denials and the imposition of impossible conditions for convoys to reach the north of Gaza, where the majority of displaced people live. That means they see corpses on the road and people with visible signs of starvation stopping trucks to search for food to buy.
