Overcrowded camps force Palestinians back to Gaza City danger
Monitoring Desk
GAZA: Conditions in overcrowded coastal encampments for displaced Palestinians in Gaza are so desperate that some people who fled Israel’s new offensive on famine-struck Gaza City in recent days are heading back towards the falling bombs.
Those fleeing are mainly seeking shelter either in the area by the sea immediately west of Gaza City or in Mawasi, a sprawling tent camp along beaches and farmland in the south that Israel has designated a humanitarian zone, aid agencies said.
Many of them are arriving to find no space for shelter, few tents, inadequate water supply and restricted health care, according to over a dozen Palestinians who had made the difficult trip with their families and who, along with UNICEF and the Hamas-run Gaza government, spoke to Reuters for this story.
“I have been in the sun for two days looking for a place and could not find any. Now I had to take my belongings and go back to Gaza City,” said Mohammed al-Sherif, 35, who left the Sabra district of Gaza City along with his family and those of his two brothers on Monday after Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets on the area warning all civilians to get out.
With many motor vehicles destroyed and little petrol, travel inside Gaza is slow and expensive. Sherif’s family loaded all their belongings on a donkey cart and went to Mawasi, where Reuters video showed them trudging through densely packed camps, but they have no tent and could find nowhere to stay, he said.
Israeli forces killed 11 people in strikes on various parts of Gaza City on Thursday and five in a strike on the al-Shati camp, according to medics and local health authorities. In August, a global hunger monitor said Gaza City was in famine.
Despite Israel’s call for the population to leave, the Hamas-run Gaza government estimates that 1.3 million of Gaza’s roughly 2 million total population remain in Gaza City and the north.
The UN humanitarian country team, a grouping of UN agencies working in Gaza, rejected Israel’s description of Mawasi as a humanitarian zone.
“It has not taken effective steps to ensure the safety of those forced to move there and neither the size nor scale of services provided is fit to support those already there, let alone new arrivals,” the team said in a statement on Wednesday.
Israel has conducted strikes inside areas it has designated safe or humanitarian zones throughout the war. Shoshani said it struck Hamas fighters wherever they emerge, including Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif in Mawasi last year, and that militants hide among civilians. Hamas denies using the civilian population and property for military purposes.
UNICEF spokeswoman Tess Ingrams, who was in Gaza this week, said there was very little space in Mawasi, where she had seen tents set up along the shoulder of roads. She said the inland areas there were where conditions were worst.
