UN aid teams on Friday highlighted the disturbing situation in Gaza’s makeshift hospitals, where premature babies cry for scant oxygen and medics attempt to save child survivors targeted by airstrikes in their tents and quadcopter victims reportedly shot while fetching bread.
Speaking from the war-shattered enclave amid the ongoing Israeli military push to take full control of Gaza City, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder described one short visit to a hospital where youngsters were either suffering or dying everywhere he looked.
As we’re talking to the surgeon there, she dies on the bed in front of us
One victim at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, was six-year-old Aya, injured by an airstrike. “I’m really noticing not just the wound, but the attention that the bobs in her hair, the care that a parent’s given before the airstrike,” he said. “As we’re talking to the surgeon there, she dies on the bed in front of us. That’s 30 minutes in a hospital.”
No space to move
At the same hospital, Mr. Elder reported seeing three children “all shot by quadcopters” – an attack drone with four propellers.
“It’s a war zone, children … bleeding out on the floor”with otherswounded by shooting, shrapnel or burns.
The UNICEF spokesperson underscored reports that 1,000 infants have been killed in the last two years in Gaza since Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel triggered the war. “We have no idea how many more have died from preventable illnesses,” he continued.
With only around 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals still open and partially functional after almost two years of war, they are often “absolutely packed” with people needing help, Mr. Elder stressed.
Rescued, terrified
“I turn around and there’s a little girl, Sham, who has just been pulled from the rubble; so, she’s covered in that dust and smoke with that terrified expression on her face, being held by an aunt or an uncle… Now Sham didn’t have any broken bones nor internal injury, [she] was not told though, that her mother and her sister were both killed in that attack.”
Turning to Gaza City, the veteran UN aid worker stressed that many thousands of people remain there unable to leave, amid continuing Israeli evacuation orders airstrikes that have left children “shuddering” and gazing skywards “to track the fire” from helicopters and quadcopters.
“You’ve got shoeless children who push grandparents around the rubble, amputee children are struggling through the dust, mothers are carrying exhausted children – literally their skin is bleeding because of the severity of rashes,” Mr. Elder continued, before warning about “continued indiscriminate attacks in densely populated civilian areas despite official statements”.
Another aid worker killed
On Thursday, the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) confirmed the killing in Gaza of its fourteenth medical worker, occupational therapist Omar Hayek, in an attack that also injured four of his colleagues in Deir Al-Balah.
Until 13 September he had worked at an MSF clinic in Gaza City before finally evacuating amid “relentless attacks and forced displacement from Israeli forces”, the NGO maintained.
“People are scared and rightly so…“If you ask me now, can we do our work? I say no, of course we cannot do our work in the north,” said Dr Rik Peeperkorn, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The level of violence in Gaza is such that nowhere is safe, including field hospitals, which offer no protection from stray bullets, said Christian Cardon from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
“We had several occasions of people being injured, brought to the hospital and while they were being treated, were wounded again because of stray bullets coming in the hospital,” he said, noting another such incident on Thursday according to UN News.
Al-Mawasi was no refuge, just another stop in a long journey of suffering, where life is not truly lived, but merely endured.”
Once again, we were forced to leave northern Gaza under a relentless storm of shelling, fear, and destruction—beginning yet another displacement heavy with exhaustion and loss, this time toward Al-Mawasi in Khan Yunis.
There, in the place the occupation claimed was “safe,” with access to water, medicine, and basic humanitarian needs, we found only land overwhelmed with displaced families, weary faces, and recurring pain. Al-Mawasi was no refuge, only another stop in a long journey of suffering, where life is not truly lived, but merely endured.
Our joy at touching the walls of our home again did not last long. It was the same home that had been struck by Israeli shells during the ceasefire. We returned carrying hope, trying with our tired hands and hearts to clear the rubble, to wipe the dust off memories, to bring back a trace of the home’s old heartbeat.
We believed that love would be enough to stay—that holding on to our home, even with all its wounds, was the least we could do. As a family, we made a promise: we would not leave, we would stay as long as we had breath in our bodies.
But the occupation, with its violence and arrogance, stripped us of even that right. And once again, we were left with nothing but the bitterness of forced departure.
In the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, we were trapped under fire from quadcopter drones. They shelled and chased every movement, making it impossible to open the door or even glance through a window. We lived through endless nights of terror, listening to the constant buzzing above our heads, counting the seconds until the next missile would strike.
Then the occupation installed a crane-mounted sniper position to the east of the neighborhood, targeting anyone who moved through the streets. It felt as though they had surrounded us with a fence of fire, suffocating our lives, tightening the noose around us, and forcing us once more toward displacement.
The final days before our departure felt like the horrors of Judgment Day. Many of our neighbors received evacuation warnings, followed by devastating shells. The smell of gunpowder and smoke still lingers in my nose to this day, and I continue to struggle with breathing from the intensity of what we endured. We were cut off from water and food; markets were closed; even street stalls became targets for bombs dropped by planes at night. We had no choice but to flee southward to escape certain death.
The journey of displacement was harsh in every detail. My elderly parents, burdened by chronic illness, could not endure the long road. We carried their worries in our hearts before carrying them in our arms. Our trip from the north to the south took nearly six hours under a blazing sun, along the Rashid Road, which the occupation designated as the evacuation route.
On the way, we witnessed a scene that will never be erased from memory: a tent on the beach shelled right before our eyes, with bodies scattered across the sand. We were only meters away, yet that distance was enough to rob us of sleep forever. Even now, whenever I close my eyes, that scene returns to wake me.
After the exhausting journey, we arrived at the Khan Yunis displacement camp. The place was unbearably overcrowded. Services were scarce, far too few for everyone. People were forced to go down to the sea under the scorching sun to collect salty water, which led to the spread of skin diseases among both adults and children. Watching people fill bottles from the sea felt like a scene from an apocalyptic novel. Everything here is difficult: sleeping, eating, getting medicine—even finding a small patch of shade to rest beneath has become a challenge.
Today, we live in a whirlwind of anxiety and fear. Every day, we watch the news of new residential towers collapsing in Gaza. We go to sleep wondering: will our home still be standing, or will it too become rubble? My parents need ongoing medical care and medications that we cannot find.
I feel powerless and frustrated at my inability to secure their medicine, and at our family’s helplessness in the face of this relentless tragedy.
And yet, despite all this, there is an inner voice that refuses to give in. It whispers to me that Gaza will endure, and that one day we will return to the north to rebuild, stone by stone, raising our homes again with our own hands. That voice tells me this land will remain free and proud, no matter how long the destruction lasts, and that all this pain is but a chapter in the story of resilience.
Gaza is bleeding today, but it will not break. The Gaza I bid farewell to—with hope of return—will always remain in my heart a symbol of dignity and pride, until every displaced person comes home, every child returns to school, and every family reunites with its memories.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Shaimaa Eid is a Gaza-based writer. She contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.
All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.
“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.
“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”
After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food, no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.
What about the handicapped
‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.
“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”
He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know.
We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.
Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare.
Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.
We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”
The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.
We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.”
Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.
Blood on the streets
“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.
It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.
In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.
Sullen future
“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.
Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.
But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.
The Israeli army is destroying about 300 residential units daily in Gaza City and Jabalia, using around 15 robots carrying nearly 100 tonnes of explosives.
These bombings are taking place at an unprecedented pace, aimed at destroying Gaza City and displacing its residents, as part of a dangerous escalation of the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for nearly 23 months.
Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented the Israeli army’s intensified use of armoured, explosive-laden robots to demolish residential areas at an accelerating pace. Most homes and infrastructure in Jabalia al-Balad and Jabalia al-Nazla have already been destroyed, while the army advances with comprehensive destruction toward the heart of Gaza City from the south, east, and north.
Since the Israeli army announced last Friday, the end of what it called a “temporary humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza City, which it claimed applied during daylight hours, Euro-Med Monitor’s field team has documented a doubling in the number of explosive-laden robots detonated, from about seven to nearly 15 per day.
Each of these robots is loaded with highly explosive materials, sometimes weighing up to seven tonnes, and is directed to detonate in Jabalia al-Balad and Jabalia al-Nazla north of Gaza City; the Zeitoun, al-Sabra, al-Shuja’iyya, and al-Tuffah neighbourhoods south and east of Gaza City; as well as the al-Saftawi and Abu Iskandar areas northwest of Gaza City.
The unprecedented pace of destruction of residential neighbourhoods in Gaza City using explosive-laden robots indicates Israel’s determination to wipe the city off the map. At the current rate, the rest of the city could be destroyed within two months, a timeline that may shorten further given the Israeli army’s massive firepower and the absence of any pressure to halt its crimes against Palestinians.
After preliminary assessments of the robot attacks, Euro-Med Monitor estimates that each robot can completely or partially destroy around 20 housing units. This will soon leave hundreds of thousands of people without homes or shelters, forcing them to flee once again in deadly conditions, without even the bare minimum for survival.
The robots used in the bombing are essentially Israeli military vehicles, such as outdated M113 armoured personnel carriers, loaded with tonnes of explosives and remotely piloted through civilian neighbourhoods. They are directed to explode in carefully selected locations to maximise destruction. In some cases, the robot is not rigged to detonate but is fitted with large boxes of explosives that are unloaded at the target site, after which the vehicle is returned to base for reuse in other operations. This reflects an organised military strategy aimed at systematically destroying residential neighbourhoods and maximising the scale of devastation.
The catastrophic impact of explosive-laden robots extends beyond the physical destruction of residential neighbourhoods to the systematic use of psychological terror against civilians. The Israeli army deliberately detonates most of these robots late at night or at dawn to spread fear and panic and force residents to flee. The explosions produce deafening sounds that shake Gaza City, while the remaining buildings shudder under the violent blast waves, deepening the population’s suffering and turning daily life into a constant state of terror and insecurity.
The sound of explosions from these robots often carries beyond the entire Gaza Strip, heard at distances of over 40 km from the blast site. This demonstrates the immense destructive force of such weaponry, which Israel employs to wipe out cities in the enclave.
The international community’s blatant inaction and complicity, together with the refusal of influential states and relevant UN and international bodies to hold Israel accountable, have enabled it to carry out the destruction of Gaza City openly, without even attempting to invoke legal justifications to legitimise the crime.
Such blatancy was illustrated by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz’s statement on 22 August, when he declared: “If they [Hamas] do not agree to Israel’s terms, Gaza will become Rafah and Beit Hanoun. Just as I promised – so it will be.”
The first documented use of robots by the Israeli army to destroy residential areas occurred during the two campaigns against the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip in May and October 2024, before their deployment expanded to other areas across the Strip.
Israel’s use of explosive-laden robots is explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law, as they are inherently indiscriminate weapons incapable of accurately targeting military objectives. Their wide-area explosive effect directly and indiscriminately impacts civilians and civilian objects, in blatant violation of the principles of distinction and proportionality, which form fundamental pillars of international humanitarian law.
These weapons fall under the category of prohibited arms, and their use in populated areas constitutes both a war crime and a crime against humanity, as they cause widespread killing, forced displacement, and deprivation of basic living conditions as part of a systematic or widespread attack on the civilian population.
Moreover, the systematic use of such robots, as currently practised to destroy residential neighbourhoods and strip residents of their homes and livelihoods, makes them a direct tool for committing genocide. This pattern of destruction clearly falls within the acts defined in the Genocide Convention, specifically the intentional infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the group, in whole or in part.
The use of these destructive methods, primarily robots, not only causes loss of life and forces residents into deadly displacement but also seeks to obliterate residential neighbourhoods and infrastructure entirely, erasing any possibility of life in Gaza City and undermining Palestinians’ future, along with their inherent right to remain on their land and return to their homes.
Explosive-laden robots are only one of the methods used by the Israeli army to wipe out cities in the Gaza Strip. They form part of a broader arsenal of destructive tools, including aerial bombardment with missiles and heavy bombs, continuous artillery shelling, the dropping of bombs and explosive packages from drones, the deliberate booby-trapping and detonation of buildings, and the use of military and civilian bulldozers to raze structures or what remains of them.
More than one million Palestinians in Gaza City face an existential threat as Israeli destruction, starvation policies, and forced displacement persist, amid the international community’s unjustifiable silence on this unprecedented crime.
The UN General Assembly must urgently act under Resolution 377 (V) “Uniting for Peace”, which authorises it to address situations where the Security Council fails to act due to a lack of unanimity among its five permanent members. Under this resolution, the General Assembly may issue recommendations to UN member states for collective measures to ensure the restoration of international peace and security.
The General Assembly must urgently act under the aforementioned resolution to establish and deploy an international peacekeeping force in the Gaza Strip. This step is necessary to end crimes against civilians, guarantee their protection, secure unhindered access to humanitarian aid, safeguard medical and relief facilities, and stop the systematic targeting of such facilities. Activating this mechanism is both a legal and moral duty of the international community to protect over two million people in Gaza from ongoing genocide and grave violations.
All states, individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal obligations and act urgently to stop this genocide in Gaza, taking every feasible measure to protect Palestinian civilians there. They must enforce Israel’s adherence to international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice and hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.
Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians before both international and national courts. This includes, without waiver, enforcing the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for the Israeli Prime Minister and former Minister of Defence at the earliest opportunity and surrendering them to international justice to stand trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including killing, persecution, other inhumane acts, and the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
The international community must also impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel in response to its systematic and grave violations of international law. This includes banning weapons exports to Israel and halting arms purchases from it; suspending all forms of political, financial, and military support and cooperation; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians or inciting such acts; and imposing travel bans on them. Moreover, trade privileges and bilateral agreements that grant Israel economic advantages, enabling it to commit crimes, must be suspended.
“Blood covered my face. My hair was burning. The fire in my hair was the only light I could see,” Tasneem whispered, recalling the night her world collapsed.
I can’t imagine an end to this war. I can’t even define the peace of imagining what it would look like, because war has stolen everything from Gazans, even the light in their eyes.
Just months earlier, 19-year-old Tasneem was preparing for her tawjihi, Palestine’s crucial high school exams that decide a student’s future. Like thousands of other students in Gaza, she dreamed of scholarships, university, and a life beyond the blockade. Instead, she was fighting to keep her eyesight, grieving her sister and father, and carrying her schoolbooks through displacement camps.
Her story is one among thousands. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Education, 15,553 school students and 1,111 university students have been killed since the genocide began. Another 23,411 schoolchildren and 2,317 university students were injured, many left permanently disabled. For Gaza’s youth, war has not only destroyed classrooms but also their bodies and futures.
The Night That Changed Everything
It was October 10, 2023, at 2:30 a.m. in Bani Suhaila. Tasneem and her sister Hadeel stood at the window when shelling lit up the street near the Asfour station.
“Suddenly, smoke, dust, and fire blinded me,” Tasneem said. “Blood covered my face. My hair caught fire. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. My hair burning was the only light around me.”
When she looked back, she saw Hadeel lying on the floor in flames. “That moment is the hardest I’ve ever lived through,” she said through tears.
Tasneem stumbled down the stairs as flames consumed the upper floor. Shattered glass cut deep into her feet. Her leg broke when she slipped. Outside, the sky glowed red and the streets burned.
“I sat on the street with my hands on my head,” she recalled. “I just wanted this nightmare to end.”
Tasneem, after her last surgery in Gaza — blind in one eye, barely seeing with the other.
Loss Upon Loss
Tasneem thought her entire family had died. Whispering the shahada, she braced for death. But her parents were alive, and in the chaos her mother tried to comfort her. “Mama, my face is all distorted. I can’t see, only blood,” Tasneem cried. Moments later, they discovered the unbearable truth: Hadeel had been martyred.
Her injuries were severe; a burst eyeball, retinal detachment, and deep cuts that required stitches. Gaza’s hospitals, overwhelmed and starved of resources, made her wait hours before doctors could treat her.
Just three days later, tragedy struck again. Her father, Adli Baraka, was killed in another Israeli strike. “I felt like I lost all my vision and hope,” she said.
The Fight for Sight
On October 11, a private doctor warned her family that her condition was critical. Without immediate surgery, she would go blind. With Gaza’s health system collapsing, the operation was performed without anaesthesia, crude stitches to hold her eye together.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that around 1,500 people have already lost their eyesight during this genocide, while another 4,000 are at risk due to shortages of medicine and equipment. UNRWA has warned of catastrophic consequences as Israel continues to block vital aid, including supplies for eye surgeries.
For Tasneem, the pain was relentless. Doctors warned her not to cry, not to stress, not to strain her eye. But how could she obey, when she had just buried her sister and father, and was living under bombardment?
Dreams Against the Rubble
On November 3, 2023, after weeks of delays, Tasneem was finally evacuated to Egypt for emergency surgery. By the time she arrived, her right eye was blind. Surgeons injected silicone oil in hopes of saving her remaining sight.
Despite advice to stay in Egypt and continue treatment, Tasneem returned to Gaza. Her younger siblings were still there, and after her father’s death, she couldn’t abandon her mother. She gave up comfort and medical care to be with her family.
Tasnim Baraka after undergoing surgery on her eye in Egypt, November 2023. Her mother took this photo as they hoped for a chance at healing after weeks of devastation.
Now she lives in a tent, suffering headaches, worsening pain, and the weakening of her other eye. And yet, she studies. Every time she fled — from Bani Suhaila, then Rafah, then Deir al-Balah — she carried her schoolbooks with her.
“The doctors told me reading could make my eyes worse,” she admitted. “But I still took my books. They are my last hope.”
Her books are not just paper and ink; they are her defiance. In a genocide that has stripped her of almost everything, they are the one dream she refuses to surrender.
The Unseen Wounds of War
The physical injuries are only part of Tasneem’s struggle. Shame keeps her indoors. “When I wear the eye patch outside, I feel so ashamed,” she said. “I’m a young girl who wants to live like other young ladies.”
Her mother, Ghada, reminds her daily that she is beautiful, no matter the scars. But emotional healing is nearly impossible in a place with no safe spaces, no medical aid, and no support for trauma survivors. Every step of Tasneem’s recovery has come not from international organizations, but from her family’s sacrifice.
A Message to the World
When I asked Tasneem what she wants now, her answer was simple:
“I wish the war would end. I want the suffering to stop. I want proper medical care for my eye and to continue my education like other girls. I don’t want to lose my eyes — I need them as a child needs something with all of its heart.”
Tasneem’s story is one of tens of thousands. Gaza’s children are not just casualties of bombs; they are being starved, blinded, and denied the chance to learn. Her voice is a reminder that these are not numbers — they are young lives, interrupted but still fighting.
“Put yourselves in our place,” Tasneem said, her one good eye filling with tears. “You couldn’t live one minute as we do.”
CrossFireArabia
