“There are no safe places“. The cry so often invoked by the population of Loop and the humanitarian organizations that have been working in the Strip since this last war began with Israel has become more evident than ever after the massacre at the Arab al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, filled at the time of the attack by doctors, patients and hundreds of displaced people. It was apparently nothing more than an explosion, preceded by a rapid hiss and followed by a fireball that gutted the health center on Tuesday afternoon. There is at least 471 deadaccording to the Gaza Ministry of Health, an enormous infamy that marks a turning point in this war. It only remains to be seen who will manage to capitalize on it because, although the Palestinians were quick to hold Israel responsible for the war crime, the Jewish State maintains that it was an errant rocket from the Islamic Jihad. which unleashed the pandemonium.
The authorship of the attack has been frantically discussed since then in the court of public opinion with videos, photos, geolocation data, evidence collected on the ground and abundant misinformation. The Israel version is that it does not respond to their way of acting, because there would be no evidence of a direct hit on the hospital, neither structural damage in nearby buildings or a crater of the entity left by its heaviest bombs, according to military spokesman Daniel Hagari. His public relations apparatus published a conversation between alleged Palestinian militants who recognize the error, while Binyamin Netanyahu He added that a volley of projectiles “launched by Gaza terrorists” passed near the hospital at the time of impact. “The intelligence we have from various sources indicates that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch,” said the Israeli prime minister during the visit of the US president, Joe Biden.
On the other side, there are also arguments. Since I could have been a lighter projectileperhaps launched from a drone, because the rocket could not reach the height or the necessary trajectory to generate so much destruction if it had been launched from a nearby cemetery to the hospital, as Israel also said. An advisor to Netanyahu, Hananya Naftaliwent so far as to publish a tweet – later deleted – where it was read: “The Israeli Air Force has hit a Hamas terrorist base inside a Gaza hospital.”
Islamic Jihad flatly denied responsibility, while Biden he aligned himself with the Israeli position. “From what I have seen, it seems that it was done by the other side.” His National Security Council He later followed up by stating that, according to his preliminary analysis, “Israel was not responsible.”
Numerous attacks against health centers
The only certain thing is that Israel has bombed numerous health centers since this war began, as it did in previous ones, in a clear violation of the international right. Before Tuesday’s massacre, the World Health Organization (WHO) had documented a total of 57 attacks against Gaza’s health system and its staff, including 17 hospitals and 23 ambulances. Bombings that have killed 16 health workers and injured 28, according to the WHO. The Al Ahli hospital itself, managed by the Anglican Church of Jerusalem and founded in 1882, had been hit three days earlier. “Our Arab Ahli hospital was hit this afternoon by the Israeli bombs. “Two floors are partially damaged and four people are injured,” Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum posted on his Facebook page on Saturday.
And all that comes in the middle of the collapse of living conditions in the enclave, subjected to “total closure” of its borders for more than a week and a collective punishment that does not subside. “There is no water neither electricity in Gaza. Soon there won’t be either meal neither medicines. A humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented is taking shape in everyone’s eyes,” he said during the day Juliette Touma, director of communications at UNRWA, the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees. The doctors are operating without anesthesia and with the patients lying on the floor, according to several sources. Many do not drink more than unhealthy water. And the million displaced Because of the Israeli bombing and its expulsion orders from northern Gaza, they have nowhere to go.
“The south is not safe. The bombing has not stopped at any time and there have been several massacres there too,” Safwat al-Kahlut, a veteran Gaza journalist, tells this newspaper. “The UN schools They are full, also the apartments and also there are no means of transportation because there is no gasoline left.” Tens of thousands of people have fled in cars, vans and donkeys. They sleep in friends’ houses, schools, wedding halls, universities or lying under a tree. But tens of thousands have stayed in the north and the capital, also included in the “evacuation orders“Israeli.
Everyday farewells
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Kahlut is one of those who has chosen to go south, but he spends part of the day looking for water for his children. On Sunday he cost him six hours find a bottle. “This used to be the largest open air prison in the worldnow we have become the largest refugee camp of the planet,” says the journalist. Pure misery. Two of the first neighborhoods destroyed by Israel are To Rimal and Nasser, the least poor in the Strip, where the few leisure options for its 2.3 million inhabitants, more than half of them children, were concentrated. “Every day we wake up knowing that it could be our last. We have stopped greeting people, what we do now is say goodbye every time we meet someone we know,” explains Kahlut.
When the blockade of Gaza began 16 years ago, Israel briefly calculated the minimum calories what each inhabitant needed to avoid unleashing a famine. Now it seems that he will do something similar. Netanyahu He promised Biden this Wednesday that he would let in “limited help“ across the Egyptian border. It is much more than what his Interior Minister had recommended hours before, Itamar Ben Gvir. As long as Hamas does not release the 199 Israeli hostages it is holding, he said, “the only thing that has to enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosives of the Air Force”.