(Khan Younès) Rahma Saqallah had fled Gaza City bombed by the Israeli army towards the south, with her husband and four children. She returned there on Thursday with only her daughter, the others having died in a strike against a house in which they thought they were safe.
“Wherever we go, we will die,” said Mme Saqallah, 40, preparing to leave the Khan Yunis region in the south to return to Gaza City.
She is one of some 600,000 Palestinians, according to the UN, to have left the north of the Gaza Strip towards the south from October 13 after the Israeli army ordered civilians to leave “for their own security” in leaflets dropped from the sky.
The Israeli bombings, launched on October 7 in retaliation for a bloody Hamas attack in Israel, focused in the first days on Gaza City, even if no area seemed spared.
But according to the UN, some 30,000 displaced people have returned to the north of the territory in recent days “due to incessant bombings in the south and the difficulties in finding adequate shelter”.
“My husband, Fadel Saqallah, and my three sons, Daoud, Mohammad and Majed, were martyred on Tuesday at dawn,” said Rahma Saqallah, met on Wednesday before her departure from Khan Younès and who confirmed by telephone on Thursday that she had returned to Gaza City.
“Die in our homes”
Her husband was 47 years old, her son Majed nine, and Daoud 18, while Mohammad “should have celebrated his 15e birthday” on Wednesday, according to her.
The strike “destroyed the second and third floors” of a building in which several families, in total around sixty people, had taken shelter.
The bombing killed, according to her, eleven members of the Saqallah family, including her husband and three children, “and 26 people from other families”.
“Of my family only me and my daughter Raghad (17 years old) remain. We are alive, but I cannot say that we are well,” she confided. “They have reduced Gaza to ruins, they want to turn it into a cemetery.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu is a liar. They called us to go south and they killed us,” she added.
More than 7,000 people have died in the Gaza Strip, including many children, according to the Palestinian Islamist movement.
After taking refuge in a hospital in Deir el-Balah, further south, Abdallah Ayyad, his wife and their five daughters squeezed into the trailer of a three-wheeler, heading north to return to Gaza City.
“We return to die in our homes. It will be more dignified,” said the father, in a tone mixing disgust and resignation.
“We live in humiliating conditions here. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no toilets and to top it off, there are bombings all around,” he lamented.
“No place is safe”
Some left the south, but, unable to reach their homes in the north due to intense bombardment, they resigned themselves to taking refuge in al-Chifa, the main hospital in Gaza City.
Entire families are crowded under canvas tarpaulins hung against the walls and concrete pillars as tents.
“Me, my wife, my children and my brothers-in-law, about 40 people in total, live in a tent that is not even three square meters. It’s undignified even for livestock,” said one of the displaced, Mohammad Abou al-Nahel.
“It is difficult to use the toilets due to overcrowding. We constantly see martyrs and wounded arriving. We have no clean water to drink and the children are sick because of the cold,” says another displaced person who left the south to take shelter in the hospital, Mennah al-Bahtiti.
The UN humanitarian affairs coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Lynn Hastings, warned on Thursday that “no place is safe (in the) Gaza Strip” due to Israeli bombings.
Questioned by AFP about its strikes in the south after having ordered civilians in the north to head there for their own safety, the Israeli army did not react immediately.
The war between Israel and Hamas left more than 1,400 dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians on the day of the attack on October 7, according to the authorities.