As Gaza’s sole power station ran out of fuel amid a tightening siege, hundreds of terrified people sought shelter in the entry of the enclave’s largest hospital, huddling together as bombardments rained down.
“The hospital is completely full and things have started to run low. And this is only day four,” said Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon at Gaza City’s main hospital, al-Shifa.
“The situation continues to deteriorate, the number of patients, especially kids, that are coming in with horrendous injuries …” he said, his voice trailing off. “This morning there was a child, a young girl, with indescribable facial injuries whose mother is a doctor at al-Shifa who was killed when their home was targeted. Last night, another 10-year-old boy with also devastating facial injuries who was taken out from the rubble of his home in Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.”
A few hours after the Palestinian minister for energy said Gaza’s only power station had enough fuel to last another 12 hours at most, Gaza’s energy authority said the fuel had run out. The generators that many across Gaza have struggled to keep running in order to power homes and hospitals appeared on the brink of sputtering out without fuel, with no deliveries available due to the closure of Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt.
“Soon all services vital for the survival of the population, including hospitals, will no longer function,” said Gaza’s Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights.
The Palestinian Civil Defence, responsible for search and rescue in Gaza, said a large number of people remain trapped under the rubble of their destroyed homes. The organisation said on Tuesday that its rescue workers were unable to retrieve corpses from under the wreckage due to Israeli airstrikes as well as a lack of supplies to be able to carry out search and rescue work.
On Monday Israeli officials promised a “complete siege” of Gaza, after an attack by Hamas militants on Saturday that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a cut to all electricity, water, food and fuel supplies to the enclave, home to more than 2.3 million people, almost half of whom are children. At least 1,100 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli bombardments, and more than 5,000 wounded.
Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, decried the decision to tighten Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza, which had already vastly limited the movement of supplies including food, fuel and building materials, into a total siege. “We are talking about war crimes and collective punishment that Israel is implementing,” she said.
The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, on Wednesday called for lifesaving supplies including food and water to be allowed in Gaza.
The UN office for humanitarian affairs said at least 260,000 people had fled their homes in the territory.
Rama Abu Amra, a student living in the south of Gaza City, said she had spent the night in fear after warnings that a nearby building would be struck.
“I went through terrifying moments. We knew that the building opposite us was about to be bombed, so me and my family had to leave our home quickly without knowing where we should go,” she said. “When this happened, I didn’t have any internet connection to tell my friends or people around me. I just can’t get what happened out of my head.”
Léo Cans, Médecins Sans Frontières’ head of mission for the Palestinian territories, described the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic”. He said doctors there had lived through multiple previous attacks on the territory, and “they say this time it’s different, that they don’t see a way out and wonder how it’s all going to end … there aren’t words to describe what people are going through.”
Cans added: “Now the Israeli government has decided to completely cut off water and electricity supplies, and the phone network has been badly damaged. This morning, we were unable to reach our teams in Gaza by phone. Inevitably, this all makes it extremely difficult to coordinate rescue operations and access the injured.”
He said medical facilities had not been spared by the relentless bombardments and that one hospital MSF supports was damaged after an airstrike, while a second strike destroyed an ambulance carrying wounded people.
“Medical facilities must be respected. This is not something that should have to be negotiated,” Cans said. The Palestinian Red Crescent said at least four paramedics had been killed in Gaza due to Israeli strikes in one day alone.
Bombardments destroyed entire residential areas, with images showing piles of shattered concrete and rubble.
B’Tselem’s Sadot expressed alarm at news that US officials were discussing brokering a humanitarian corridor rather than increasing pressure on Israeli authorities to cease the bombardments and the siege.
“It’s outrageous, you cannot evacuate 2 million people,” he said. “There’s no way, we’re already talking about hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes. There is no way to bomb such a densely populated area without harm to civilians.”
Mohammed Ghalayini, an air-quality scientist living in Manchester who had returned to Gaza City to visit his family, said he was shocked by the suggestion that Palestinians would have to flee the besieged strip.
“We don’t want more dispossession. I don’t mean to detract from the humanitarian need, but we’ve been putting plasters on humanitarian needs for the past 75 years,” he said.
