While everything Israel celebrates the release of the four young people detained by Hamas Since last October 7, following an IDF blitz, new details have emerged on the operation that freed them. The four hostages in the Gaza Strip were prisoners in Nuseirat refugee campin the center of the Palestinian territory.
That something was moving in the area had been clear since this morning, judging by the deployment of forces. According to reports from the Arab media, the IDF arrived from the axis of Salah al-Din, crossing Wadi Gaza via the main road of Nuseirat. The blitz was a mix of heavy artillery bombardment and minor bombing of the city. Tanks would then advance north of Burij towards Nuseirat, while the city would also be bombarded from the sea.
Nuseirat, named after a local Bedouin tribe, welcomed more than 1,000 people before the war 80 thousand Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA. As in the case of other refugee camps, also in Nuseirat camp the availability and quality ofwaterfall are a cause for concern. Before the conflict there were seventeen installations of the UN refugee agency, fifteen buildings hosting a total of twenty-six schools, a food distribution center shared with the Bureij refugee camp, two health centres, two relief offices and local social services, a maintenance and sanitization office.
Even before the war the camp, which like all the others suffers from a very high rate of unemployment among the population, faced problems of electricity interruptions, fishing limits imposed by Israel, high population density, lack of building materials. The overcrowding and the lack of living space characterize the Nuseirat camp. The shelters are built next to each other and there is a general lack of recreational and social spaces. In many cases, residents have had to add rickety and unsafe extra floors to their shelters to accommodate their families.
Nuseirat has been at the center of the news in recent days, due to Israel’s massive attacks in the area, considered a refuge for Hamas terrorists.
Nuseirat mayor Iyad Al-Maghari was killed on Thursday along with four other people in an attack on a municipal building, hours after Israeli warplanes killed at least 40 people, most of them at a school managed by UNRWA.
