Even before Israel gave the order for a million Palestinians to leave their homes and flee south, Lubna took her four children and all the possessions they could carry and moved to a friend’s house in Khan Younis, nearer the Egyptian border.
The family were able to share a room at first, but now in the wake of the Israeli edict and bombing campaign, that is no longer possible.
“We are not the only family at the house now. There are other families. We are sleeping seven ladies in the same room and the men [are] sleeping outside,” Lubna wrote in a series of texts from Khan Younis. “There is no electricity or water,” she said. “The strikes are everywhere.”
The implication behind the order for northern Gazans to move south to towns like Khan Younis and Rafah was that it was somehow for their own safety, but Lubna says the bombing in the south is constant. Her friend’s house has been only narrowly missed.
“When I say everywhere, it’s literally everywhere,” she said of the airstrikes.
Alongside the bombing, the worst privation for her family is the lack of water. Gaza has been cut off from fuel supplies for two weeks now, so there is no power to run its desalination plants or water pumps. Even if more relief convoys get through from Egypt, Israel has prohibited them from bringing fuel, lest it be used by Hamas. The dire water shortage has no end in sight, and severe dehydration is already widespread.
“This is very difficult – every person can get less than one litre a day,” Lubna said. The UN-recommended bare minimum for basic survival is 15 litres per person per day.
“There is no water since three days,” she added. “We eat canned food. Since there is no water to cook or clean, we use plastic plates and spoons. During my period it was very difficult to find water to clean myself and do my routine hygiene.”
Lubna is with her 17-year-old daughter Salma, 14-year-old Ghena, Suliman, aged 11, and Ahmad, who is just eight. They are cooped up in an ever smaller space, never knowing whether the next bomb will be the one that hits the house.
She described her children as “calm” in normal times – youngsters who didn’t make trouble. But they have changed over the past two weeks of upheaval and fear, shouting more and becoming hyperactive.
“We want to go back to our normal life,” Lubna said. That seems a distant hope now, with a threatened ground offensive by the massed Israeli forces arrayed along the border.
The constant bombing of the south has made many of the million displaced Palestinians wonder if they are any safer there, and whether it would be better to take their chances at home. The UN Relief and Works Agency has reported some displaced people leaving their shelters in recent days and moving back to the north.
“Everyone is thinking of going back, but it’s very dangerous,” Lubna said.
Like Lubna, Khadija and her family left their home in line with Israeli instructions. They moved to another building nearby where they shared a flat with friends, 25 people in all, but that was clearly not safe either.
“We received a call from the Israeli army to move from this place,” said Khadija, which is not her real name. “Then we went to the centre of the city near to a hospital, thinking that it would protect us.”
That offered no safety either, and the district continued to be heavily bombed. So they made the trip southwards. “That day will be etched on my memory,” Khadija said. “We drove south, and I saw hundreds of people walking under the blazing sun; a woman who just gave birth leaning over her husband and putting their little baby in a box; disabled kids, old people, all on foot.”
The family is now in Khan Younis, with 30 people in a flat, and feeling no safer. “We are still under fire, we are still suffering, still living without the simplest necessities of life. No water, no electricity, no food,” Khadija said. “Please stop the war.”
Twenty lorries crossed the border on Saturday, under a deal brokered by US president Joe Biden three days earlier, but it represented a derisory amount of assistance. The lorries carried emergency medical supplies but no food, water or fuel. As far as aid agencies are aware, there will be no deliveries at all on Sunday.
Peace seems even more remote. At the “peace summit” in Cairo, there were calls from the UN secretary general, António Guterres and others for a humanitarian ceasefire, but there were no Israelis there to hear the pleas, nor any senior US officials. The bombing continued, and 360,000 Israeli reservists are waiting by their tanks and armoured cars for the order to move into Gaza. On Saturday Guterres called life in Gaza a “godawful nightmare”, but for more than two million Palestinians, it could soon become even worse.
