Gaza’s safe zones, a mirage under Israel’s bombs

Weariness and hopelessness grip Palestinians like Mohamed Abu Rajila, 27, who at the start of the war launched the Gaza Youth initiative to help people displaced by the conflict. These days he is in the area of ​​Al Mawasi and Khan Yunis, where Israel killed at least 90 people on Saturday in a humanitarian camp that its own army calls a safe area for displaced people from other parts of the Palestinian enclave. The main target of the multiple bombings by fighter planes and drones was a senior Hamas official, Mohamed Deif, whose death two days later is denied by the fundamentalist group and has not been confirmed by Israel.

Asked about the events of the weekend, Rajila is pessimistic and angry. “What do we think? Why is our opinion important? Who will listen to our opinion? After they listen to our opinion, will anything change? It has been 10 months of genocide. What has the world done in the face of this extermination? Nothing, really nothing, so our opinion has lost importance in this world that follows double standards to judge events,” he answers by phone via text message.

The United Nations and humanitarian organisations have been insisting for months that there is not a single piece of land in the 365 square kilometres of the Gaza Strip that is safe for residents. “Not in the north, not in the centre, not in the south, not anywhere,” said Louise Wateridge, a UN spokesperson in Gaza, in a telephone conversation. Saturday’s bombing, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is just a reminder of this evidence.

“It was a horror. There were hundreds of wounded and dead,” but in reality this happens almost every day. Today (Monday), for example, there was also an air strike inside a humanitarian zone, although it was much smaller, but yes, it is almost daily,” explains Pascale Coissard, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, referring to Saturday’s bombing. In the Palestinian Mediterranean enclave, more than 38,600 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since the war began on October 7, most of them women and children, according to data from the Hamas government’s health authorities.

Wateridge remembers Jamal, a member of his team who had been employed by the United Nations for 14 years. “He left Rafah with his family as he had been ordered to do. He moved to Deir el Balah and on the first night he was killed in an Israeli airstrike with some of his family members,” he laments. “But that is everyone’s story. Everyone has lost someone. Everyone has lost their home. Everyone is displaced, some quite a few times.”

On the night of Friday to Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu oversaw the bombing of Al Mawasi. The president, according to the newspaper Yediot Aharonotwas concerned about three issues: the type of ammunition to be used, the possible presence of hostages in the compound where the Hamas members were being held, and the anticipated collateral damage. These concerns did not serve to stop the attack.

In these more than nine months of conflict, the Israeli security forces have been informing the population of the areas to which they had to move in forced movements of hundreds of thousands of people. Some families, according to reports by humanitarian organisations on the ground, have been pushed up to ten times from one point to another, almost always with only the clothes on their backs. These orders contravene international humanitarian law. In the same way, it is also illegal to carry out bombings in civilian areas, even if the target is, as Israel always claims, Hamas “terrorists”.

“Is the price paid by the displaced people of Gaza on Saturday fair? How many children, health workers, women, elderly people and ordinary residents will Israel kill for a certain Mohamed Deif? How much blood must be spilled to satisfy the appetite of the military and political leadership?” asks, against the grain of the majority of the local press, Israeli analyst Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz.

A “more chaotic” phase

“We are in a completely different phase of the war, which is more chaotic. People have fewer belongings, they have been moving from one place to another again and again, attack after attack, and people have nothing left,” says the UN spokeswoman. “You see someone walking forward with a baby under each arm and that’s it. That’s it,” adds Wateridge, who describes Khan Yunis as a ghost town where people, already very malnourished, have ended up living among the rubble and skeletons of buildings that could collapse at any moment.

Khan Yunis’ main hospital, Nasser, was overwhelmed on Saturday. The paediatric wing and maternity ward, where MSF staff work, were turned into emergency rooms for victims of the bombing. “The staff were overwhelmed, stressed and worried about all the patients we were receiving. There was a little boy with his father there. His father had a wound on his back and the boy was sitting there looking a bit bewildered. We felt terrible because I’m not sure the boy knew that his father was the only surviving member of the family,” said Amy Kit-Mei Low, MSF medical officer at Nasser hospital, in a statement provided by the humanitarian organisation.

Her description details screams from patients, a lack of painkillers and trails of blood on the floor in an area that is not prepared to treat the wounded that were arriving. One man died for lack of something as simple as a machine to suck out the blood that had accumulated in his mouth. “He died; they killed him,” the nurse explains.

The attack on Al Mawasi and the dozens of deaths are “a stark reminder that no one is safe in Gaza, wherever they are,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s High Commissioner, in a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter). He believes that these zones declared by the Israeli authorities are a deception, since, in reality, they do not exist. “It is time to recover our common humanity. The people of Gaza are children, women and men who, like you and me, have the right to live and hope for a better future,” added Lazzarini.

Pascale Coissard also warns that the successive movements of citizens have further increased the population density in certain areas of Gaza, which in the whole of the Strip was 5,500 people per square kilometre at the start of the conflict, one of the highest on the planet. Now they live even more crowded together and it is increasingly difficult to find a space in which to put up a tent or an awning to take shelter under, to which must be added temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius under these tarpaulins, adds Coissard.

All this, with much less access to basic supplies such as electricity, water, food or shelter. Successive attacks in areas declared safe have been undermining the morale of Gazans, which is why “more and more people decide to stay where they are because, even if they move, they feel just as insecure.” “Most of the population is exhausted. On my previous trip, in November and December, they were already tired and traumatized. Now I find them resigned as well. If then they welcomed the ceasefire negotiations with optimism, now nobody talks about them,” says the MSF emergency coordinator in the Strip.

The occupation troops had already attacked other areas where they had crowded tens of thousands of civilians. This happened, for example, in Rafah, the southernmost part of the Strip, on May 27. There, a bombing of a camping area in the Tel al Sultan neighborhood killed at least 45 people, 23 of whom were minors. This happened just two days after the International Court of Justice in The Hague demanded that the Jewish State “immediately” stop its military operations in this border area with Egypt.

“The impact of war is very noticeable in children,” explains Coissard. “A colleague told me that her five-year-old son can distinguish between the sound of a drone, an air strike or a tank,” she explains.

“There must be a ceasefire and it all depends on the political will. That is the only hope. It is the only option. A ceasefire combined with the return of the remaining hostages. That is what everyone needs,” Wateridge claims, describing Gazans as exhausted by so many fruitless attempts at a deal. Other phases will come later, “but until the fighting stops, there will be no tomorrow,” concludes the UN spokesperson in Gaza.

Follow all the international information at Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.