Palestinians in northern Gaza feel Israel hasn’t met ceasefire terms
There is a consensus among people here that the Israeli military is only interested in the release of the captives and not honouring the terms of the ceasefire.
Vital aid was supposed to be let in and was supposed to be sufficient to meet the needs created by months of devastation and destruction. We’re in Beit Hanoon, where there is only one central hospital in the city of approximately 60,000 people.
The Israeli military had decided that this hospital was not needed in the area and destroyed it completely with multiple bombs. It’s just more of a pile of rubble right now. The alternative to this hospital is the two tents, they’ve been set up as a hospital, a medical centre to serve hundreds of people.
We’ve seen people queueing here, waiting for the doctors and the medical staff to arrive at the tents. We couldn’t help but hear them complaining about the lack of medical supplies and the lack of proper medical care.
Palestinians in ‘destroyed’ Beit Hanoon need urgent help
All across Gaza, not only in the north of the Strip, we see the urgent need for humanitarian aid, which needs to be allowed into the enclave immediately. There is a need for this more than ever since the beginning of the ceasefire and the return of people to their homes.
The city of Beit Hanoon, where we are, happens to be a border city in the northeastern part of Gaza. When we drove through the main road of the city, we saw that destruction was everywhere.
We also saw that the central hospital of the city, which provided medical care for a major part of the city, was completely destroyed. The residential buildings around it that were densely populated and used to house many families were also destroyed.
The majority of the people who lived in this area were forced into displacement in the early days of the war. Those who stayed here, refusing the forced evacuation orders, were killed inside many of these buildings. And a lot of them are still buried and missing under the rubble.
North Gaza authorities warn of severe lack of clean water
An official from the municipality of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip has spoken to our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic about the dire humanitarian situation in the city.
Here are a few of the comments:
- The northern Gaza Strip suffers from a lack of sufficient quantities of diesel and rubble removal machinery.
- There is no clean drinking water in the northern Gaza Strip and sewage is spreading among the people.
- Municipalities cannot manage the crisis alone and need international support.
- No tents, mobile homes or rubble-clearing machinery have entered the northern Gaza Strip.
- The international community is standing by as a spectator to the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.
- Israel is trying to thwart the ceasefire by not adhering to the humanitarian protocol.
- More than 90 percent of Gaza’s population does not have access to water and the lack of sanitation is widespread in most areas.
A convoy of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid supplies for the Gaza Strip waits at Egypt’s New Administrative Capital, about 45 kilometres east of Cairo, on February 16
