Gaza- After 3 hours spent by Abu Jamal – a retired teacher – in the popular market in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, he returned to his family empty-handed, except for a few tomatoes and onions.
Abu Jamal is not a resident of the city of Rafah. Rather, he was displaced there with his wife and four children, and they reside with his parents, three siblings, and their families in a shelter center in a government school, after he was unable to find space for them in a shelter center affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
This city, located in the far south of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt, is crowded with more than 600,000 displaced people, raising its population to 900,000, and UNRWA expects the number to rise to more than a million, in light of the widespread waves of displacement of residents of the city of Khan Yunis, which is under a violent Israeli attack.
Shelter centers in government schools do not provide relief assistance, like UNRWA. Abu Jamal says – to Tel Aviv Tribune Net – “I have money and there are no goods in the market, where agricultural goods and crops are decreasing hour after hour, due to the continued closure of the only Kerem Shalom commercial crossing, which is controlled by Israel.”
Scarcity and expensive
The closure of this crossing since the outbreak of the Israeli war on the seventh of last October has affected all aspects of life, and the majority of shops were forced to close their doors after they were completely empty of goods and merchandise.
Abu Jamal lit a fire with a little firewood and used book papers next to the classroom in which he lives at Al-Quds Secondary School in the center of Rafah, and prepared a plate of “fried tomatoes” for his family. He said, “Today we found tomatoes, and God knows if we will find them tomorrow or not.”
The prices of vegetables and agricultural crops rose dramatically, due to their scarcity in the markets and the inability for farmers to reach their lands adjacent to the Israeli security fence. These areas located east of the city of Rafah and the rest of the cities in the Gaza Strip represent the “food basket” for the population.
For the same reason, and due to the lack of animal feed, owners of livestock farms are forced to slaughter calves and cows while they are small and of low weight, to avoid their death, but the majority of Gazans cannot afford their exorbitant prices. Abu Jamal comments, “Do we spend money on meat, when we do not know how long the crisis will last?”
The reality of the situation of Abu Jamal and his family applies to the majority of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the small coastal enclave. UNRWA says that 1,900,000 of them have become displaced, and they are all in need of humanitarian support.
According to the media advisor to the UN agency, Adnan Abu Hasna, “the aid that enters Gaza is a drop in the ocean of humanitarian needs, whether before or after the temporary truce.”
The head of the “Health Emergency Committee” in Rafah, Marwan Al-Hams, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that poor nutrition for children and infants increases the incidence of anemia and anemia, and threatens the spread of diseases and epidemics, especially in crowded shelter centers.
One meal a day
Twenty-year-old Hadeel Badawi cannot find milk for her newborn, whom she gave birth to at Al-Baptist Hospital a few hours before she was forced to move from a shelter in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, to a shelter center west of the city of Rafah, in the south.
Hadeel (20 years old), the mother of a girl no more than two years old, gave birth to her baby, “Musab,” whose name has not yet been registered in official records, due to war conditions and the disruption of government departments. She tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net that she is struggling to breastfeed her baby, and does not have the money to buy the milk that was mainly lost from Pharmacies and shops.
The young mother subsists on one meal from the daily assistance provided by the shelter center administration to the displaced, and she explains that it is “insufficient and unhealthy” and not suitable for her as a woman who has recently given birth.
UNRWA acknowledges that it is distributing what Abu Hasna described as “crumbs” to all residents of the Gaza Strip, following its decision to distribute flour to all residents, both citizens and refugees, in response to the urgent need for this basic material, which is only available to UNRWA through aid trucks arriving through the Rafah land crossing with Egypt.
The average number of aid trucks per day is estimated at about 55 trucks, which, according to official UNRWA data, represents only about 5% of the sector’s needs.
UNRWA found itself responsible for the entire population in the Strip, after it had been responsible for about 70% of the Gazans it describes as refugees, who come from refugee families from cities and towns in historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948.
An employee at an UNRWA shelter center, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the relief aid provided to the displaced in the centers has declined significantly, and does not meet their daily living needs, especially for women and children, who represent the largest percentage of the displaced.
Hadeel reported that, on Tuesday, she received one small box of fava beans, a bottle of water, and a piece of biscuits, which would not be enough for her until the next day. She was pushing herself to satisfy her baby, while she felt great concern for the life of her infant.
die from hunger
The United Nations World Food Program renewed its repeated warning of an “imminent humanitarian catastrophe” in the Strip. He said in a statement commenting on the renewed fighting following the collapse of talks to renew the temporary truce, that this “will increase the severity of the catastrophic hunger crisis.”
“Food and water supplies are virtually non-existent in Gaza, and only a small portion of what is needed reaches across the border,” said WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain. “With winter approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and a lack of clean water, civilians face the immediate possibility of starvation.”
“There is no way to meet current hunger needs through a single operational border crossing, and the only hope is to open another safe corridor for humanitarian aid to bring life-essential food to Gaza,” she said. This is confirmed by other local and international organizations regarding the Rafah crossing, which is not prepared to supply a larger number of trucks.
The director of the government media office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, told Al-Jazeera Net, “Stopping the entry of aid or following a trickle-down policy is a despicable method of putting pressure on the Palestinian people, children, and women, by depriving them of food, medicine, and the important and basic necessities of life, and is tantamount to a collective death sentence.” .
To save the sector from complete collapse and an imminent humanitarian catastrophe, Al-Thawabta called for the entry of 1,000 trucks of real aid and supplies on a daily basis, to respond to the actual priorities and needs of the population, in addition to one million liters of fuel per day.
According to Al-Thawabta, this aid has become the only source for the majority of Gazans, in light of the occupation’s continued closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing, which is the only commercial crossing through which more than 500 trucks loaded with various types of the sector’s humanitarian and living needs flowed daily.
The Director of the World Food Program in Palestine, Samer Abdel Jaber, says, “Our ability to provide bread or transport food to those in need has severely deteriorated, which has led to the cessation of life in Gaza. People are suffering from hunger.”