‘Nowhere in Gaza is safe,’ aid worker says

Hassan Morajea: The situation is extremely dire. The needs are tremendous. Almost everybody we speak to is asking for extreme basics: water, food, some level of shelter. People are waking up and going to sleep to the sounds of drones overhead, regular shooting and bombardment. And everywhere you go, the sides of the roads that aren’t in complete ruin are serving as space to erect your tent or makeshift shelter with your family. And that’s for those who are in better condition. All buildings that are standing are being used as some form of shelter by large numbers of people, and essentially, the services to keep the population alive, it’s just not there.

From speaking to other organizations operating in the area, I know that there
are extreme restrictions on the importation of medicines and some key items that are
needed to sustain and run a medical facility.

There’s also quite a lot of restrictions on the ability of emergency medical teams to actually enter Gaza in the first place, along with other humanitarians.

So, as a result, the already completely depleted medical services in Gaza are even further stretched when you have instances similar to what happened over the weekend in Al-Mawasi.

The food situation is also extremely tight. So, while there are some basic commercial goods arriving, it’s extremely expensive and so the majority of the population is not able to afford that.

We were at a reception point this morning on the main road connecting the north and south of the Gaza Strip, and we were looking to speak to people who are on their way down on foot and on the backs of small carts in order to get to safer areas, but also areas where food is slightly more available in the middle area.

The stories that they were sharing were extremely horrific of not having eaten a proper meal in quite a while, not having access to any shelter. There were some people who had
gone down to scope the situation in the middle region, because of the fact that they weren’t quite sure that the services would be there, and indeed in some instances, they were not able to find those services.

So, they weren’t even sure whether to take the risk of bringing the rest of their family down with them, only to find that they’d given up shelter in order to find no sustainable food. So, it’s been a constant, delicate balance for people to, sort of, think about, “If I do have a home and I’m in northern Gaza, do I leave that shelter to potentially find food, potentially not? If I don’t have shelter in the middle region, am I going to find shelter somewhere else?” It’s quite difficult.

It’s extremely worrying. A lot of people that I speak to outside of Gaza keep asking me what the situation in Gaza is like and how it compares. Throughout my career, I’ve seen countless streets destroyed by conflict.

They’re quite often ghost towns, completely abandoned by populations who sought refuge somewhere safer. In Gaza, on multiple occasions, the entire face of a building will have been ripped off, gaping holes where rockets came firing down. And yet, somebody will be using that dangerous building as shelter.

I think what we have to understand is, unlike a lot of conflict zones, seeking refuge is not really an option in Gaza. People here don’t really have anywhere to go. And as far as we’re concerned, nowhere in Gaza is safe. From that perspective, you add to that the challenges relating to our ability to get aid in and get aid actors in to activate the sites that need to be operational to receive and to serve populations in need. It doesn’t really look too hopeful.

I think it’s important to realize that the events that occurred over the weekend
are occurring on a very regular basis, but then even within the so-called “safe zone” or
“humanitarian zone” — and I really must emphasize that we don’t like to use that concept of safe zone, because we don’t think of these areas as being safe.

Deir al-Balah, where I am at the moment, is considered a safer area. But even there, we’ve had, in the week and a half that I’ve been here, at least three airstrikes that have targeted buildings in the area where each time we’ve had civilian casualties.

It occurs on a very regular basis. I think, certainly the events over the weekend were much larger in scale and impact, and therefore attracting a bit more attention. But I certainly don’t think that comes as a surprise to the population here.