1 year since the start of Israel’s attacks in Gaza, life is dire 

Around midnight on Oct. 1, Dr. Majed Jaber had finished work for the day at the European Hospital in southern Gaza when he heard loud noises that he recognized well. 

“The artillery shells, the drones, the quadcopters did not stop,” he recalled a day later over a WhatsApp call.

The physician knew that once again, the war had come close to the hospital. Soon, the tanks rolled in.

“We were hearing the engines and their chains moving closer to us. We were hearing the machine guns shooting,” he said.

Oct. 7 marks a year since Hamas fighters stormed across the border into Israel. Israel says some 1,200 were killed and 250 taken hostage. Hamas still holds some of those hostages, and their conditions are unknown. 

Israel’s response has made most of Gaza largely uninhabitable. Some 42,000 have been killed, according to health officials, and those who have survived lack basic necessities like shelter, food and clean water. Health care and humanitarian workers say they struggle to provide care in the face of daily Israeli bombardments and red tape.

At the hospital, Jaber and his colleagues were in survival mode. They stayed away from the windows and hunkered down inside the building.

The way Jaber remembers it, the attack lasted for seven hours. The artillery didn’t hit the hospital, but no one slept.

“We feared for our lives that night. And this is one of the very rare nights that I really feared for myself.”

In the morning, when the army withdrew from the area, dead bodies arrived at the hospital. Jaber counted at least a dozen. The exact death toll is hard to know, he said, given that some bodies remain under the rubble and the first responders can’t get to them because it’s too dangerous.

The ‘unbelievably difficult’ task of aid delivery

“More and more Palestinians are losing their lives. If it’s not from bullets, it’s from starvation or it’s from lack of medical care,” said Hani Almadhoun, who lives in the US and runs a soup kitchen in northern Gaza from afar.

His parents and siblings are there, he said, “living through hell.”

Northern Gaza has been mostly cut off from the rest of the enclave, Almadhoun said, and Israeli forces have severely limited the amount of goods into or out of that part of the strip.

The soup kitchen distributes hot meals to about 800 families a day, he said. It serves pasta, rice, whatever they can get their hands on.

“We go and buy the produce. Sometimes, we forage [fruits like] persimmons and melons. We get it as a gift from nature. It’s one of the few things that Palestinians are sustaining themselves with right now,” Almadhoun said.

The food is desperately needed on the ground.

In videos that Almadhoun shared, people were clamoring  on top of one another trying to get their empty pots in front of the distributors.

Israeli and United Nations data shows that aid and food deliveries into Gaza have dropped to their lowest levels in seven months.

For many people in Gaza, food has become a luxury they can’t afford.

“My mom was telling me one banana cost her $13,” Almadhoun said, adding that a carton of eggs is $110.

Aid workers on the ground say they are doing what they can to alleviate the situation but they are faced with painful decisions daily.

Gavin Kelleher is with the nongovernmental organization, Norwegian Refugee Council and has been in Gaza since April.

“This morning, we had to consider, do we go ahead with distributing water to a site that still has bodies on the ground inside of it or do we deprive water from the population who need it so much?” he said. 

They plan to try again.

Kelleher said the aid workers themselves are under threat.

Last week, he and a group of others were traveling in a convoy to get aid into northern Gaza. He said they had coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces and had all the required paperwork.

“And still, when we tried to cross the checkpoints to get into northern Gaza, the IDF on the ground opened fire to the right of our convoy; tanks approached us extremely hostile,” Kelleher said.

They decided it was too dangerous, and they headed back, he said.

The Israeli Defense Forces said in a response to questions about the incident that “in response to Hamas’ barbaric attacks, the IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas military capabilities. In stark contrast to Hamas’ intentional attacks on Israeli men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”

Meanwhile, back at the European Hospital, Jaber said he is exhausted. A year ago, he was planning to go abroad to continue his education, not even imagining the kind of life he is living right now.

“Most of us here are, well, like the rest of the world. We have ambitions, we had plans to live a very decent, dignified life, and now we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost our houses, our livelihoods, our loved ones,” he said.

The worst part, he added, is that there seems to be no end in sight.

Editor’s note:The Israeli Defense Forces responded to The World’s inquiry after the radio version of this story went to air.