The United Nations all-terrain vehicle wobbles on the sandy road along the sea in northern Gaza. Louise Wateridge, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, films the landscape through the windshield: an endless field of ruins, without the slightest human life, like an apocalyptic scenario. “An entire society that has become a cemetery”he wrote on X, posting his video on November 7.
His colleague Georgios Petropoulos, who heads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Gaza Strip, felt the same fear when he visited the north of the enclave in early November. “Not a single building remains intact. The level of destruction is total. There is no road, it’s just sand. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”explains over the phone. Israel prohibits foreign journalists from entering coastal territory.
Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, following the attack carried out by Hamas in southern Israel, the northern quarter of the territory has been subject to separate treatment. The Israeli army ordered its evacuation on October 13, 2023, bombed it heavily and deprived it of humanitarian aid almost continuously. The northern governorate, which includes Beit Lahya to the west, Beit Hanoun to the east and Jabaliya, which housed the largest refugee camp in the enclave, a little further south, was also the first to be invaded by the Israeli army at the beginning of its territory. offensive, at the end of October 2023. The attack suffered by this area since October 6, 2024, it is, however, of unparalleled brutality.
Several hundred dead in a month
In the early hours of the day, Israeli soldiers ordered the remaining Palestinians in the area (a population estimated by the United Nations at 175,000 people) to evacuate. “In less than twenty-four hours, these areas were besieged and the schools where civilians had taken refuge began to be attacked and emptied”writes Ayman Lubad in World from the center of the Gaza Strip.
His wife, three children and the rest of his family remain in Beit Lahya. Arrested in December 2023 and then detained in an Israeli army center where numerous cases of torture have been documented, this researcher from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO, was unable to return to northern Gaza after his release. The 32-year-old father now lives hooked to his phone and on edge.
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