As Israel’s war against Gaza hits six months, I have many friends trapped inside the Strip, all desperate to escape. They are in the South, mainly in Al-Mawasi, a strip of coast and sand dunes I know well, close to the city of Khan Yunis. When I lived in Gaza, I used to swim at Al-Mawasi; its warm waters were green, and the sea air perfumed from the nearby guava and orange plantations. Now hundreds of thousands of women, men and children who’ve lost their homes sleep across Mawasi in tents, or out on the bare sand. My good friend Ola Aburamadan and her family (whose photo frames this post) are in a tent, eating when they can and showering once a week.
It’s difficult to convey the rancid, deadly squalor Palestinians have been forced into during this half a year of all-out war. Water is so scarce, children in northern Gaza are dying of thirst. People can’t find food – the calorific intake, again in northern Gaza, has gone down to 250 calories a day, less than a tin of beans. Let’s be clear: the Israeli government has imposed this acute hunger and thirst by denying all but a trickle of emergency aid into the Strip. As supplies have become skeleton, Ola tell me that prices have gone mad; and who is still earning money in Gaza?
Above all, fear stalks everyone. More than thirty three thousand Palestinains, mostly civilians, have been killed in these six horrific months, including at least 200 Palestinian aid workers. This fear is vividly reflected in the numerous appeals across fundraising platforms, asking, sometimes begging, for money so families can pay the fees – and bribes – to cross the border at Rafah and escape. I desperately want Ola and her family to escape Gaza. This is the link to the Go Fund Me page that a mutual friend of ours, Inge, has set up for the family. Please share it with everyone you know who might respond.
Ola and I have messaged almost continuously since October last year, sharing hundreds of Whatsapp messages; I’ve tracked her and her family from their home in Gaza city to Khan Yunis and now Al-Mawasi. She is with her elderly parents, Wael and Eman, her twelve year old sister Sarah, and her three brothers, Basel, Basharnd Mohammed. Like every family in Gaza they are deeply traumatized: Basels’ fiance, Reem, was killed with two of her sisters in an Israeli airstrike in December. Wael and Eman need daily medicine to stay healthy and this is getting critical.
I want to support this appeal because I want the Aburamadan family, and all my friends, to be able to leave Gaza. I know they don’t want to leave and they are exhausted yet furious they are being violently hounded from their country. But they have each seen enough death and they want to survive.
Yet I despair that while Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and other leaders wring their hands about forcing Israel to increase humanitarian aid and better protect civilians – when they could have forced Netanyahu’s hand months ago by threatening an arms embargo – Palestinians inside Gaza raise tens of thousands of dollars to pay bribes to leave what WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus calls “The death zone” of Gaza.
There are conflicting reports that Israeli troops are pulling out of Southern Gaza. The truth is we don’t know what is going on, only that we are witnessing spasms of violence and mass killing that has plunged Israel into a long-term bloody war. Netanyahu’s willful political myopia will not bring the Israeli hostages home, nor will it make Israel safer. Tragically it will only ensure the opposite, and our own leaders must also take responsibility for their utter failure to challenge Netanyahu and save civilians’ lives.
To quote the sage political commentator Patrick Cockburn, “One of the great mysteries of the Gaza crisis is why the US did not stop it months ago, as it was well able to do. Even now Biden is demanding that Israel give access to food aid, but still supplying the bombs Israel will drop on civilians who go to collect the aid.”
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