OfGreta Privitera
The city is under attack: «Everything is missing, even water. People now have blank looks.”
When the children heard the adults say: «Hamas has accepted the ceasefire agreement», they took Mohammed Rajab’s cell phone, connected it to a speaker, wrote on a piece of paper «the ceasefire party » and they danced for the next two hours. Shortly thereafter, the government of Netanyahu responded that the “proposal accepted by Hamas is far from Israel’s requests”but the adults didn’t tell the little ones because they wanted them to go to sleep happy.
Then, the bombings began in the eastern part of Rafah — the city on the Egyptian border where over a million Gazans have found refuge — and the children woke up. «We told him that it wouldn’t last long and that peace is truly near. But none of us believe it anymore: Netanyahu has no interest in ending this war,” Rajab says in a video call.
Rajab is a man from Gaza City. He answers from al-Mawasi, which with Khan Younis is the city indicated by the Israeli Defense Forces as a safe area for the one hundred thousand refugees from the recently evacuated area east of Rafah and for two days the new target of the army searching for Hamas militiamen.
Rajab lives with his entire family – which includes 17 children and grandchildren – in an apartment with a view of the Mediterranean. He shows us an infinite expanse of tents cut in half by a road that follows the curves traced by the beach. It’s called the Sea Road. We can distinguish aendless line of cars and carts and people. «They are the ones who come from Rafah»he says.
«The situation is out of control. This cannot be considered a humanitarian zone, Israel had announced that it would expand the al-Mawasi refugee camp, but it is all false. Here there is not a free hole, everything is missing, the infrastructure is missing, the sources from which to get water. There are hundreds of cases of hepatitis,” continues Rajab.
“This attack in Rafah is the final blow to our dignity,” he says Noor Nashwan, young researcher from Gaza City who has just left the city on the Egyptian border with her family. «We walked four hours to reach al-Mawasi. We don’t have money to rent a car. My parents are elderly, it’s the fourth time we’ve taken the last rags we have left and changed tents.”
She says that what shocks her are no longer the broken houses, the dead, the bombs «but the blank looks from people. It seems that Gazans no longer have feelings, who, dehumanized by the world, have stopped being human.” He wonders if this void, this anesthesia of the soul, can ever be cured.
Also Martina Marchiòcoordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Rafah, had believed, or perhaps more hoped that a truce was possible. «But no. For two days people they are evacuating, but they don’t know where to go, what to do. In just two hours we saw over 500 families pass through our clinic. Israel’s offensive on Rafah will have disastrous effects for over a million already suffering people.”
Meanwhile, at the Indonesian hospital, MSF has started discharging patients who can walk to prepare for a possible evacuation.
Reham Moeen, a 27-year-old pharmacist, writes to us: «I’m in the West block, I haven’t yet received the message that I have to leave. I fear that this time I will be the one to die.”
May 8, 2024 (modified May 8, 2024 | 08:07)
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