“My kids are crying because they are hungry and tired and can’t use the bathroom,” said Suzan Wahidi, an aid worker and mother of five at a UN shelter in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, where hundreds of people share a single toilet. “I have nothing for them.”
With the Israel-Hamas war in its second month, trapped civilians are struggling to survive without electricity or running water. Palestinians who managed to flee Israel’s ground offensive in northern Gaza now encounter a scarcity of food and medicine in the south, and there is no end in sight to the war sparked by the Hamas terror group’s devastating October 7 onslaught in southern Israel, in which over 1,200 people were murdered, mostly civilians, and at least 239 were kidnapped.
Israel’s subsequent aerial and ground offensive targeting Hamas infrastructure has killed over 11,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The figure cannot be verified independently and is believed to include members of terror groups and civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets. Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of embedding itself among civilians, using them as human shields, and plundering the Strip’s resources for its own purposes while civilians suffer severe shortages.
Over half a million displaced people have crammed into hospitals and UN schools-turned-shelters in the south. The schools — overcrowded, strewn with trash, swarmed by flies — have become a breeding ground for infectious diseases. READ MORE
