Nearly 1 million Palestinians in Gaza face winter without shelter
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) says only 285,000 displaced Palestinians in Gaza had received essential shelter materials by late November.
This leaves some 945,000 people still in need of assistance.
“We’ve received only a fraction of the aid required to address the shelter crisis,” said Jeroen Quanjer, the council’s shelter chair in Palestine.
“Hundreds of thousands of displaced families are enduring the winter cold and rain without meaningful protection. Israeli authorities’ repeated denial of essential shelter materials prevents us from scaling up our response to build emergency shelters that can withstand Gaza’s winter conditions.”
Displaced Palestinians inspect their tents after sea water swept them away in the al-Mawasi area, on the beach near Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 25 November
‘It’s only a matter of time before you die in Gaza’
Karin Huster, a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders who worked in Gaza, has shared an account of what she saw during her recent assignment in the Palestinian enclave.
“It’s kind of hard for me not to cry about this,” she wrote. “Because I don’t think I have seen an army that has been so… nonstop in its aggression toward a civilian population—and more specifically, toward children and women who we all know very well have nothing to do with the original aim of the Israeli army, which was to get rid of Hamas.”
The number of women and children at the emergency rooms is “just mind-boggling”, Huster said. “And the number of kids I have seen with amputated arms or legs, or kids who were killed is just mind-boggling.”
She described conditions in Gaza as an “apocalypse” that is man-made and “willingly made”. “None of this destruction was left by chance,” she wrote. “Palestinians in Gaza live on borrowed time. It’s only a matter of time before you die in Gaza.”
The original aim has always been to get rid of the Palestinians.... Hamas was/is a tool for that purpose, previously supported by Netanyahu himself.
‘Injuries I’ve never seen in my life’: Doctors recount Israel’s attack on UN-run school
We’ve been covering an Israeli attack that killed at least 20 people at the UN-run Ahmad Bin Abdul Aziz School in Khan Younis on Sunday. Casualties were taken to the nearby Nasser Hospital.
International doctors from Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) who were there reported that the emergency department was inundated with casualties.
“The emergency department was full of women, children and elderly patients with severe injuries. I lost count of the number of patients that came in with injuries I’ve never seen in my entire career,” said one doctor. “I counted at least 18 victims who died in the emergency department, of these there were 12 children under the age of 12 years old.”
The doctor said their first patient was a three-year-old girl who had the left side of her forehead torn open by shrapnel fragments that had penetrated her skull.
“It’s very clear to me that the children I witnessed yesterday are not members of any militant organisation, these are young children who are trying to escape war by sheltering in a UN school. Yet they were massacred, I’ve got no other way to describe it,” the doctor said.
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