(Rafah) On his knees, Khouloud Jarboue rummages through a pile of clothes. When this Gazan woman fled her home under bombs, her three children were in shorts and T-shirts. Today, they survive in the rain and in the bitter cold.
“We left Gaza City with 20 members of my family more than a month ago,” this 29-year-old Palestinian woman told AFP.
The Israeli army, which has been relentlessly bombing the small territory since the bloody Hamas attack which left 1,200 dead in Israel on October 7, had ordered residents to flee to the south, which it presented as safer.
“We didn’t take any clothes with us. Now that it’s cold, I have to buy winter clothes,” continues the young woman.
At the second-hand clothes stand set up in front of the school of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), where she sleeps with her family on the floor, the clothes sell for one shekel a piece ( 25 euro cents).
Already in 2022, the UN estimated that the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip since 2007 had “emptied the Gaza economy of its substance, leaving 80% of the population dependent on international aid”.
Unemployment reaches 45% in this small territory wedged between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
No shower or laundry
Today, according to the UN, all 2.4 million Gazans suffer from hunger, 1.65 million of them have been forced to move and with almost one house in two destroyed or damaged. , poverty will continue to rise.
“This is the first time in my life that I bought second-hand clothes. We’re not rich, but usually I can buy clothes for ten shekels for my children. But there, they are coughing because of the cold. I have no choice,” explains Khouloud Jarboue.
“I’m sure these clothes are full of germs, but I don’t have water to shower my children or do laundry. They will have to carry them directly.”
A little further, on an avenue lined with dozens of stalls, hundreds of Palestinians handle clothes, measure sizes, compare fabrics. Temperatures are getting cooler and downpours fall regularly.
Walid Sbeh doesn’t have a shekel in his pocket. This farmer, who had to leave his land, leaves the Unrwa school every morning where he camps with his wife and 13 children.
“I can’t stand seeing my children hungry and in thin summer clothes when I know I can’t buy them anything,” he says.
“This is not a life, (the Israelis) are forcing us to leave our homes, they are killing us in cold blood and if we do not die under the bombing, we will die of hunger, thirst, disease and cold,” he adds to AFP.
Israeli bombings, carried out in retaliation for the massacres of October 7, left 11,500 dead, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
Winter Collection
When taking the road south after the bombing of his house, Walid Sbeh had taken blankets. “But on the road, Israeli soldiers told us to drop everything and move forward with our hands in the air.”
But people who had warm clothes that had outgrown their own children gave them to him.
Adel Harzallah runs a clothing store. “In two days, we sold all the winter pajamas,” he told AFP, claiming to have brought back unsold items from last year. “The war started while we were waiting for the winter collection. She was supposed to arrive through the border crossings, but all of them were sealed off after October 7.
Now these shipments are “waiting in containers that no longer fit”. Like foodstuffs, drinking water and fuel, each gram or drop of which is exchanged at a high price.
A customer leaves disappointed. “Seventy shekels for a jacket? I have five children to dress, impossible! “, she says.
Same disappointment for Abdelnasser Abou Dia, 27, who “doesn’t even have enough to pay to buy bread, let alone clothes…”. For almost a month, he kept the ones he was carrying while fleeing. With the growing cold, “someone gave my children and me a jogging jacket each.”
For a week, “we wear them all the time”.