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One year on, Gazans say the war has made them “bodies without souls”
Palestinian women mourn near the bodies of relatives killed in an Israeli airstrike, outside the morgue in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza, in June
A mood of desperation consumes many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who are living in dire humanitarian conditions, having endured 12 months of Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.
“We have spent a year in war,” Abdallah Hmeida, a cancer patient displaced from Beit Lahia, told CNN in the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah. Hmeida has lost his parents, his brother and his sisters in the conflict, he said.
“It is torment. We do not know where to go, and we live in tents.”
Nabila Shunnar, a displaced woman from Sheikh Radwan, said she has spent the last year “in fear, terror, hunger and tragedy.”
Residents of Gaza told CNN they did not expect the fighting to drag on for a year and some now worry it may be endless, as they see no concrete efforts to cement a ceasefire.
Some residents say they have been waiting months for the war to end only so they can bury their dead or retrieve their remains.
Um Fadi, a displaced woman from northern Gaza who now shelters in Deir al-Balah, said she lost hope in the world’s ability to act in the face of the bloodshed. Living in tents with her husband and five children, Fadi fears for the coming winter, saying her family have no clothes that can shelter them from the cold.
For Gazans, it has been 365 days “of suffering, poverty, hunger, disease, instability, and lack of security,” she told CNN.
“We are bodies without souls,” she added.
