On Sunday morning, phones belonging to the 2.3 million people trapped in the besieged Gaza Strip slowly came to life again, inundated with updates, messages and missed calls after the lifting of a 36-hour near-total communications blackout imposed by Israel.
Nights in Gaza now are completely dark. At the same time as communications were lost on Friday evening, Israel intensified its aerial bombardment and launched its initial ground operation into the strip. Ambulance drivers described how they decided to just drive towards the sound of explosions as there were no accurate coordinates to follow.
A fresh wave of anguish swept the territory as communications returned for those with charged phones and news of friends and relatives killed since Friday arrived all at once.
“It was the worst nights of bombing so far but the worst part was not knowing what was happening. It was like we were blind,” said Mohammed Bashir, a 38-year-old accountant from Deir al-Balah. Bashir, his wife, three children, and elderly mother are staying with relatives after an airstrike hit the building next door, killing 26 people, including 11 children, and damaging their own home.
The war in Gaza triggered by the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and another 230 kidnapped, is now in its fourth week. More than 8,000 people in the tiny strip have been killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry, and the survivors have no safe place to go.
The UN has warned that civil order is beginning to break down after thousands of desperate people raided UN warehouses in search of food over the weekend. Only 84 aid trucks had crossed into Gaza through its southern border with Egypt before Sunday, compared with the 500 a day that used to enter before the latest outbreak of fighting. Water, medicine, fuel and food are running out, while sewage and rubbish is piling up in the streets, increasing the likelihood of outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera and dysentery. The UN considers the siege a war crime.
On Sunday, a spokesperson for Cogat, the Israeli defence ministry unit tasked with civilian administration in the occupied Palestinian territories, said that Israel, the UN and Egypt were coordinating a “dramatic increase” in aid. A spokesperson at the Rafah border crossing said 33 trucks passed into Gaza on Sunday, the Associated Press reported.
Clean water is a pressing concern across the strip: community Facebook groups are full of requests of where to find it, and several civilians the Guardian has reached by phone and WhatsApp in the last week say they have resorted to using Gaza’s contaminated local supply and polluted sea water.
In Ramallah, thousands of migrant workers from Gaza working in Israel and the occupied West Bank, trapped outside since the war broke out, were desperately seeking news from home after the communications blackout appeared to end.
Sayef Olehe, 30, managed to talk to his wife and three daughters on Sunday. Celine, who turned three on Friday, told her father that she did not want to celebrate her birthday until there was a stop to the bombing shaking the family’s apartment in southern Gaza.
The family moved two weeks ago from Gaza City to the supposed safety of a home owned by relatives near Khan Younis, in the south of the strip, but airstrikes still rain down around them.
“She said it was not the right time to celebrate because there are a lot of people dying. She has seen too much death. She cries all the time,” he said.
Israel’s army has repeatedly called for people living in the northern half of the strip to evacuate to south of the Gaza River, on Sunday saying that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), in coordination with the UN, had set up a “safe zone” near Khan Younis, but it did not give further details.
For the estimated 1.4 million people who have already been displaced, the new call from the IDF was met with indifference. Southern Gaza is not safe from airstrikes, and many Palestinian media reports say the bombings there have led an unknown number of people to decide to return to their homes in Gaza City.
Shaban Ahmed, a public servant who works as an engineer and has five children, described the Israeli attacks over the weekend as “doomsday”.
“This morning, Sunday, I discovered that my cousin has been killed in an airstrike on their house on Friday,” Ahmed, who stayed in Gaza City despite an Israeli warning to evacuate south, told Reuters. “We only knew today. Israel cut us off from the world in order to wipe us out, but we are hearing the sounds of explosions and we are proud the resistance fighters have stopped them at meters distance.”
Hazem al-Enezi, the director of the Mubarrat Al Rehma orphanage in central Gaza City, had previously told the Guardian he and his sole remaining fellow carer were unable to move the 27 children in their charge, several of whom have physical disabilities and special needs.
On Saturday morning, during the communications blackout, the mosque next to their building was hit, shattering the centre’s windows, damaging a playroom and kitchen, and starting fires in the building and those next door. Everyone had survived with minor cuts, Enezi said, thanks to neighbours who helped to put out the fires. The emergency services did not turn up.
“There is no room at the UN shelters and they are not equipped to look after the special needs kids there,” Enezi said in a WhatsApp message. “We still have solar power so for now we will stay and the kids are in the rooms that were not damaged. We will manage.”
