The United Nations all-terrain vehicle jolts on the sandy road along the sea in northern Gaza. Louise Wateridge, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, films the landscape through the windshield: an endless field of ruins, without the slightest human life, like an apocalypse setting. “An entire society that has become a cemetery”she wrote on X, posting her video on November 7.
His colleague Georgios Petropoulos, who heads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Gaza Strip, felt the same fear when he visited the north of the enclave in early November. “There is not a single building intact. The level of destruction is total. There is no road, it's just sand. I've never seen anything like it.”he explains on the phone. Israel bans foreign journalists from entering coastal territory.
Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, after the attack perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel, the northern quarter of the territory has been the subject of separate treatment. The Israeli army ordered its evacuation on October 13, 2023, bombarded it heavily and deprived it of humanitarian aid almost continuously. The northern governorate – which includes Beit Lahya in the west, Beit Hanoun in the east and Jabaliya, which housed the enclave's largest refugee camp, a little further south – was also the first to be invaded by the Israeli army at the start of its ground offensive, at the end of October 2023. The attack suffered by this area since October 6, 2024 is nevertheless of unequaled brutality.
Several hundred killed in one month
In the early hours of the day, Israeli soldiers ordered the remaining Palestinians in the area – a population estimated by the United Nations at 175,000 people – to evacuate. “In less than twenty-four hours, these areas were besieged and they began to storm the schools where civilians had taken refuge and empty them”writes Ayman Lubad at Monde from the center of the Gaza Strip.
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His wife, three children and the rest of his family are still in Beit Lahya. Arrested in December 2023, then detained in an Israeli army center where numerous cases of torture have been documented, this researcher from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO, was unable to return to the northern Gaza after its liberation. The 32-year-old father now lives hooked to his phone, his nerves on edge.
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