The day after the entry into force of a truce between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, “the horror film” continues in the north of the Gaza Strip, according to the testimony of a resident of this area where he Israeli army has been carrying out a major offensive for almost two months.
“We are living a real horror film, the situation is indescribable,” Oum Ahmad Loubbad told AFP, reached by telephone in Beit Lahia. She speaks of “incessant Israeli bombings”, drones which “shoot at everything that moves”.
The fifty-year-old says she is “afraid” to leave her house and will leave “when the army asks us, as they did in certain neighborhoods”.
Announcing on Tuesday evening the ceasefire obtained against Hezbollah on the Lebanese front, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that military “pressure” on the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas would “intensify” in the Gaza Strip. .
The northernmost part of the small Palestinian territory remains the scene of a large-scale offensive, launched on October 6 by the Israeli army around the town of Jabalia and its surroundings, and which according to the Israeli army aims to prevent the Hamas to reconstitute its forces there.
The situation there is particularly “tragic and very difficult because the occupation (Israel, Editor’s note) does not allow anything to be introduced into the region”, says Dr Hossam Abou Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, at the edge of the towns of Jabalia and Beit Lahia.
According to him “the shooting has not stopped around the establishment”, one of only two still operating, and only partially, north of Gaza City.
Hospitals in the Palestinian territory have been hit multiple times since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the Islamist movement’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Israeli army claims that Hamas uses these buildings as bases, hiding its activities among civilians, something Hamas and medical staff deny. She said Thursday that 34 patients from Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda hospitals were transferred to “safe” facilities in the Gaza Strip.
“Over the past seven weeks, the ongoing military operation in the northern Gaza Strip has uprooted 130,000 people,” the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Thursday on X.
UNRWA also estimates that “survival conditions are dwindling for the 65,000 to 75,000 people who, according to estimates, remain there.”
From the center of the Gaza Strip, another resident, Abu Mohammed Al-Madhoun, aged 55, assures that the “situation is catastrophic” and “worse day by day” against a backdrop of “incessant bombings”. “It’s cold and the food is expensive, a kilo of tomatoes costs 200 shekels (around 50 euros, editor’s note). Who has the money to buy that?” he laments.
