In the darkness she could not find her children, no longer where she had tucked them in for the night. As stones and rubble hit her, all she could hear were distant voices. Then suddenly her world ignited, bursting into flames.
On the first night of the Israel-Gaza war, the home of Fatima Mohammad, 31, and her four children was hit by strikes in the south of the strip in the city of Khan Yunis.
“I found things falling on me,” she said. “It became dark. I heard people’s voices from afar. They were like a dream or an imagination, and I could not see my children or my relatives. My children had been asleep so I was searching for them under the rubble, then suddenly everything was on fire.” In the strike, a cousin was killed. In the adjacent house, 14 people died.
The next house they moved to, the home of another relative, had also been badly damaged. They ended up moving to a shelter in a UN-run school “because it is considered safer, but I worry there is no safety because other UN shelter schools were also bombed”.
In the north of Gaza, Hana Abu Sharkh, 42, took shelter with her six children in a tented camp in the grounds of another UN-run school after her family home was destroyed. “Even here, it feels like there is no safety because the bombing never stops,” she said. “A few days ago they bombed next to the camp and all the displaced people rushed together and stood over their children to try and shield and protect them.” She described worsening conditions in the camp, with water supplies running low and no care for those with long-term medical conditions.
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Doctors in Gaza have warned that new patients arriving at hospitals are showing signs of disease caused by overcrowding and poor sanitation. Surgeons have been forced to perform some operations without anaesthetic as supplies run critically low.
But life is about to get immeasurably worse in Gaza, even before the expected ground invasion by the Israel defence forces following the kidnapping and murder of Israelis by Hamas on October 7. Unless Israel allows fuel into the besieged territory, UN aid operations in Gaza will end today, the agency looking after Palestinian refugees warned.
• US pleads with ‘unprepared’ Israel to delay Gaza ground invasion
The reported death toll in Gaza rose beyond 5,700 after the biggest loss of life in a single day of the conflict. More than 700 people were reported killed in the past 24 hours in Gaza, with the UN saying that women and children accounted for 62 per cent of them.
Israeli airstrikes have damaged or destroyed 40 per cent of Gaza’s housing, according to the UN, with 1.4 million of its population of 2.3 million displaced as a consequence of bombardment or Israel’s orders to evacuate the north.
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Families in Gaza have described their desperate search for shelter after airstrikes on or near their homes both in the northern part of the strip that Israel has told them to vacate and in the south, where they have been ordered to move.
In Fatima Mohammad’s home town, Nahed Abu Taaema, a public health doctor at Nasser Hospital said: “The crowding of civilians and the fact that most schools used as shelters are housing lots of people, it’s a prime breeding ground for disease to spread.”
The World Health Organisation has warned that a third of Gaza’s hospitals are not operating after running out of fuel and other supplies. Rick Brennan, regional head of emergencies for the UN health agency, said: “We are on our knees asking for [a] sustained, scaled up, protected humanitarian operation.”
The situation is most critical in the northern end of the strip, where only two hospitals remain partly operational. The private Indonesian Hospital said it had switched off everything except its intensive care unit after running dangerously low on generator fuel.
The only other facility, Beit Hanoun Hospital, stopped operations because of the intense bombardment of the town, the Palestinian health ministry said. Atef al-Kahlout, the hospital’s director, said: “If the hospital doesn’t get fuel, this is going to be a death sentence against the patients in northern Gaza.”
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Rasmia Aldosh, 60, had taken refuge with others in the Indonesian Hospital until Sunday, when the overcrowding and deteriorating conditions drove them to evacuate south. “The journey was a nightmare because there is hardly any transportation available as there is almost no fuel to be found,” she said. “People are forced to drink dirty water and all my grandchildren are now sick.” She lost her five-year-old granddaughter when her son’s home was bombed. “It is the saddest thing I have ever experienced,” she said, her voice cracking.
At least 870 children are missing, feared trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, as continuing bombardment and lack of fuel prevents rescue workers from reaching them, the charity Save the Children has warned.
