Palestinians in Gaza use truce to sift through rubble from homes

After seven weeks of bombings halted in Gaza by a truce, Tahani al-Najjar took advantage of the calm on Saturday (25) to return to the ruins of her home, destroyed by an Israeli air strike that, according to her, killed seven members of her family. and forced her to take shelter.

More than 24 hours after a four-day break in fighting, thousands of Gaza residents are making the same difficult journey, leaving community shelters and makeshift camps, to find out what happened to their homes.

“Where are we going to live? Where will we go? We are trying to collect pieces of wood to build a tent to shelter us, but without success. There’s nothing to house a family,” Najjar said, sifting through the rubble and wriggling around his house.

Najjar, a 58-year-old mother of five from Khan Younis, in the south of the enclave, said the Israeli military also destroyed her home in two previous conflicts, in 2008 and 2014.

She pulled several miraculously intact cups from the ruins, where a bicycle and dusty clothes lay amid the rubble.

“We will rebuild again,” she said.

For many of the 2.3 million people living in the tiny Gaza Strip, the pause in near-constant air and artillery strikes offered a first opportunity to move to safety, take stock of the devastation and seek access to imported aid.

At open-air markets and aid depots, thousands of people lined up to receive some of the aid that began flowing into Gaza in larger quantities as part of the truce.

Since Hamas militants launched their unprecedented attack on Israeli cities on October 7, killing 1,200 people, Israel’s response has been the bloodiest and most destructive offensive ever visited on the 25-mile-long Gaza enclave. .

Palestinian health officials in Hamas-controlled territory say the bombing killed more than 14,000 people, 40 percent of them children, and destroyed residential areas. They said thousands more bodies could remain under the rubble, still unrecorded in the official death toll.

Living in tents

Israel’s military last month told all civilians to leave the north of the strip, where the fighting was heaviest, but continued to shell the south, where hundreds of thousands of people had fled and where Najjar’s home was.

He stated that civilians should not return to the north during the truce and many of those who fled south are now seeking information from those left behind.

In the patchwork of makeshift tents in front of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Mohammed Shbeir said he was desperate to get his family back home to the Al-Shati refugee camp in the north. They decided not to do so after hearing rumors that people trying to do so had been shot, which Reuters was unable to verify.

“I can’t live in a tent like this. I had a home and I felt comfortable with my children,” he said, feeding his son soft lentil soup because no milk formula was available.

However, a concomitant lockdown contributed to a humanitarian crisis with little electricity for hospitals, clean water, fuel for ambulances, or food and medicine.

At a street market in Khan Younis, where tomatoes, lemons, eggplants, peppers, onions and oranges were in crates, Ayman Nofal said he was able to buy more vegetables than were available before the truce and which cost less.

“We hope the truce continues and is permanent, and not just four or five days. People cannot afford the cost of this war,” he said.

At a UN agency center in Khan Younis, people waited for cooking gas.

Supplies started running out a few weeks ago and many people were cooking food on fires fueled by wood salvaged from bomb sites.

Mohammed Ghandour waited five hours to fill his cylindrical metal container, after getting up at dawn at the school where he and his family are sheltering and making the long journey to the warehouse, but it was still too late.

“Now I’m going home without gas,” he said.

However, at the Rafah crossing with Egypt, trucks could be seen early Saturday moving slowly across the border and into Gaza, bringing new supplies.