On the morning of Sunday, October 27, a group of men were digging, mostly with their bare hands, through the rubble of a residential neighborhood in Beit Lahiya, in the far north of the Gaza Strip, illuminating the rubble with the light of their cell phones. The previous night, Israeli bombs razed to the ground the block where three families lived: the Abu Shdaqs, the Masri and the Salmans. At least 22 people, including 11 women and two children, were killed, according to the local Ministry of Health. Neighbors and relatives carried out the search on their own: For the past four days, rescue workers have been unable to reach these areas after being threatened – some of their members have been detained by the Israeli army. “In northern Gaza, those who are injured bleed to death,” summed up Al-Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat on his X account on October 26.
“Here, for the past two days, no one has been going out,” explained Yehya el Madhoun, a journalist for the Palestinian channel Al-Kofiya, financed by the deposed former head of Fatah in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, to Le Monde by telephone from Beit Lahiya. “The situation is extremely distressing. We expect to die at any moment. Explosions go off all the time and we’re under terrible pressure.” Since October 6, Israel has been conducting an offensive to empty the northern Gaza Strip of its inhabitants out of sight. Most Palestinian reporters have fled to the south over the past year. The Israeli authorities have banned foreign journalists from entering the Palestinian enclave since October 7, 2023. Communications are regularly cut off.
In Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, two towns that border Israeli territory, and in the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest in the Gaza Strip, “the magnitude of the crimes Israel is currently committing (…) is impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world,” wrote the Israeli NGO B’Tselem on October 22, denouncing “ethnic cleansing.”
‘People have nothing’
According to the local Ministry of Health, whose figures are echoed by international organizations, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the northern Gaza Strip in just over three weeks. Some 60,000 people have fled the area, most heading for Gaza City, south of Jabalia. “The plight of Palestinian civilians trapped in North Gaza is unbearable,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Sunday evening, “shocked” by “harrowing levels of death, injury and destruction.” On Friday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said that northern Gaza was living through its “darkest moment,” in the latest attempt to alert the sluggish international community.
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