As Israeli bombs began to fall across Lebanon, the scenes of bloodshed and chaos were grimly familiar to the people of Gaza. Mai al-Afifa, 24, was teaching a workshop about how to identify unexploded ordnance in a school turned shelter in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah on Thursday when an Israeli missile hit the next building in the compound. Twenty-eight people were killed and 54 injured, according to medics at the scene.
Through the smoke and rubble dust Afifa saw the body parts of two women and a male aid worker as she stumbled to safety. The Israeli military said it had used a precise strike to target Hamas fighters using the school as a command centre.
“We are very sad about what is happening now in Lebanon … We have experienced this pain and loss,” Afifa said. “But we also fear that Gaza will be forgotten: the massacres have increased here and no one is talking about it. All the TV channels are talking about the regional war, Iran, Israel and what is happening in Lebanon.”
Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon at the beginning of October after two weeks of heavy airstrikes and targeted assassinations aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities.
Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-allied Lebanese militia, had begun firing on Israel the day after Hamas’s 7 October attack that triggered the new war, ostensibly in solidarity with the Palestinian group. Tit-for-tat cross-border fire over the last year has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the blue line from their homes.
Israel says its “targeted and limited” offensive in Lebanon is aimed at allowing Israeli civilians to return to evacuated areas. But a fifth of the country has already been displaced by Israeli evacuation orders that now cover a quarter of the small Mediterranean country, raising fears that Israel is preparing for a much wider push against the Lebanese group.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, told the Lebanese people in a televised speech last week to “free your country from Hezbollah” in order to avoid “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”.
The war in Lebanon and the threat of a region-wide escalation drawing in Iran and the US has pushed Gaza down news bulletins and the diplomatic agenda. Even so, Israel has managed to renew its year-long offensive on the besieged Palestinian territory. An estimated 400,000 people are trapped by the latest fighting in the Jabaliya neighbourhood of Gaza City, which has now entered a second week. Israel claims the ground offensive is necessary to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Badr Alzaharna, 25, from Gaza City, said he and his family wanted to leave after clinging on in their home for a year, but the fighting and Israeli snipers made it impossible. “Just walking in the street you see apocalyptic scenes … It is traumatising to be here. [Every day] I am reminded of the hypocrisy of the world,” he said.
The entirety of north Gaza is under Israeli evacuation orders: the Israeli army has told civilians to move to al-Mawasi, a coastal area in southern Gaza, for their safety, although it has also bombed the “humanitarian zone” several times. The World Health Organization said last week that seven missions to evacuate wounded people from struggling hospitals and take them south had been denied or impeded by Israeli forces.
A year on since the 7 October Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza, one in every 55 people has been killed, more than 90% of the 2.3 million-strong population have been displaced from their homes, and food, medicine and clean water are still in scarce supply amid new Israeli restrictions on what can enter the strip.
In September, UN and Israeli government data shows, deliveries of food and aid to Gaza fell to the lowest in seven months due to new rules imposed by Israel, leading the UN World Food Programme to warn that the threat of famine still loomed. Northern Gaza has had no food deliveries since 1 October. The UN body said on Saturday it had distributed the last of its supplies of high-energy biscuits, tinned food and flour, and it was unclear how long it would last.
Rohan Talbot, the director of advocacy and campaigns for the UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, said: “We are running out of words to describe the horrors we are hearing from northern Gaza. Israel’s bombardment is relentless, terrified and starving people have been gunned down as they try to flee, and dozens of bodies are lying in the street. While Israel’s war on Palestinian survival escalates, the international community appears to have given up on Gaza. All momentum towards a ceasefire has stalled.”
Internationally mediated talks aimed at a lasting ceasefire and a hostage release deal have been deadlocked since July, driving Palestinians and the families of Israeli captives seized on 7 October to despair.
Those negotiations are now overshadowed by efforts to calm the situation in Lebanon and prevent an all-out war between Israel and Iran, after Tehran attacked the Jewish state with 180 ballistic missiles earlier this month in response to the assassinations of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut and the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
Until last month, a ceasefire in Gaza was seen as key to ending the escalating regional tensions: Iran, Hezbollah and other allied militias in Yemen, Iraq and Syria all maintained they would stop firing on Israel and US assets around the Middle East when the war in Gaza ends.
But after Israel’s declaration of war on Hezbollah, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed in a speech that Tehran and its proxies would keep up the fight against Israel. Gaza’s future is no longer clearly linked to the other fronts of the war.
Mohammed Said, 36, a father of four from Deir al-Balah now sheltering with his family elsewhere in the city after their home was damaged in an airstrike, said he was resigned to the fact that the world’s attention had shifted elsewhere.
“Gaza was always forgotten. That’s why all of this has happened,” he said.
