The second largest city in Gaza, Khan Younis, in the south, has been in turmoil, having been swamped with refugees over the last eight weeks. This morning Israeli tanks led their forces into the city. The IDF claims that they will shortly surround the whole place.
The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is jammed with patients, refugees, and corpses. Many come from a school that was being used as a shelter for the displaced. Almost every inch of floor space was taken up by the wounded, medics hurrying from patient to patient while relatives wailed. Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said that many more cannot reach the hospital, as it is unsafe for ambulances to recover them or they are thought to be trapped under rubble. More generally, he said: “Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip are totally collapsing, they cannot deal with the quantity and quality of injuries that arrive at the hospitals.”
A WHO team visiting Nasser Hospital yesterday said the conditions there already were “catastrophic…. The building and hospital grounds [are] grossly overcrowded with patients and displaced people seeking shelter. The emergency ward is overflowing with patients…. Many patients are being treated on the floor.”
Yesterday an airstrike destroyed Al-Baraka Bakery, one of Gaza’s last, exacerbating the food situation. Gazans are digging through rubble, desperately searching for food.
Some of the Khan Younis residents fled farther south to nearby Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Reuters described residents trying to rescue their loved ones from the rubble with their bare hands. They quote one: “We were asleep and safe, they told us it was a safe area, Rafah and all, but at 10:20, they struck it with barrels, destroying all the block, there were children, women, and martyrs. There is no safe area, neither Rafah, nor Khan Younis, nor Gaza [City], nor [Dier al-Balah] , they are all liars, they say it is a safe area, they let us seek refuge, they evacuated Khan Younis and Gaza and still they bomb.”
The IDF announced today that they have now “completed the encirclement” of the massive Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. It has been the target of many airstrikes in the last several days. The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza was hit last night with gunfire and heavy explosions, leaving at least 108 people dead. A journalist at the hospital told CNN that he could hear airstrikes and artillery fire, and that anyone moving near the hospital was shot at. Heavy shrapnel damaged the hospital and injured displaced people living in the hospital’s yard.
The newest “safe zone” announced by Israel, after Rafah, is a five-square-mile strip on the most southwest section of Gaza, touching the Egyptian border, Al-Mawasi. It lacks any infrastructure to support refugees. Of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, 80% of them are now displaced, comprising more than 1.8 million people.
IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus explained yesterday: “We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip. We are perfectly aware that there is limited space and limited access and that is why it is so important to have the buy-in and support of international humanitarian organizations to help with the infrastructure in the Al-Mawasi area.”
This is indeed a concentration camp. There are no gas ovens nor Nazi factories to work in. Death will come by disease and starvation.
