humanitarian workers, who were able to access the north of the Gaza Strip, describe the “apocalypse”

In the Gaza Strip, last week, a fuel truck was able to reach Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City itself. It’s quite rare. Humanitarian aid is regularly blocked in the south. This truck, notably piloted by the UN and Doctors Without Borders, passed by a route which allows us to measure the extent of the despair of the population in this northern part of the enclave, which remains inaccessible to international journalists.

Through the window of one of the two armored cars which flank the white and yellow tanker truck, after the control of the Israeli army carried out with drones, we see the city of Gaza. A life is organized as best it can in a landscape at the end of the world, in the middle of rubble. Olga Cherevko, from the UN Office for Humanitarian Coordination, was in the passenger seat in the last car: “If you’ve ever seen any movie about the apocalypse, the end of the world or Mad Max… Anything totally extreme and terribly shocking is what we see there. I know Gaza very well, I lived there. When I went there, I couldn’t recognize the places that were there before. Most of the city is razed. It’s completely destroyed.”

“They survive, more than they live”

The truck’s progress is laborious. The Salah-Eddine road is covered with sand, and sometimes debris, but it is not broken. It takes a good part of the day to travel 17 kilometers and arrive at Al-Shifa hospital where Aurélie Godard, for Médecins sans frontières, measures the abyss in which the Palestinians find themselves: “They are desperate about the situation. There are many who mentioned that they had nowhere to go, that they no longer had a home… Food is difficult, access to water is a daily challenge. It’s hard to believe in a future”she explains, before specifying: “They survive, more than they live.”

Around 300,000 Gazans still live in the north, according to the UN. There are many of them at Al-Shifa hospital, determined to stay despite the living conditions and the fighting that continues around them: “They say ‘I prefer to live in my house in ruins since, even if it means being unwell, because I won’t necessarily be safer in the south and I will be in a tent without water and without electricity in the middle of I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of refugees…”specifies Aurélie Godard.

The Al-Shifa hospital is operating at a minimum: it can last six days with this new delivery of fuel oil. But access to the north is extremely restricted. Over the first two weeks of January, 95% of UN missions were refused by the Israelis.