Gaza Crisis
| Families flee in helpless terror as air and artillery strikes continue to devastate crowded areas
THEY fled by night, using their cellphones as flashlights on pitch-black roads as Israeli shells whistled around them. They carried a white flag and dragged crying children at a trot, a family of 25 headed for a relative’s house farther into the Gaza Strip.
When dawn broke, they split the family among other relatives. The grandmother, Naama Abu Hamad, 62, insisted on this. That way, she said, they could not all be killed by a single strike and lose “an entire generation”.
As the Israeli military pressed into the Gaza Strip, the hardships facing civilians deepened. Israel cut off the electricity it supplies to the strip, which was almost all the electricity that came to Gaza, said officials. For days a blasted sewage pipe had leaked into drinking water, but workers had been unable to fix it because of the danger from air strikes.
The number of Gazans displaced by the war to official shelters more than doubled in 24 hours, to 47 000 from 22 000, according to the UN, but the true figure was probably much higher since most people, like Abu Hamad, took refuge with friends and family.
“We expect the numbers to be increased in the coming hours as the ground incursion continues,” said Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for the UN agency that serves Palestinian refugees, at the start of the weekend.
All day and into the evening on Friday, air and artillery strikes continued. Where to be safe seemed a matter of guesswork. At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, members of one family said they had fled their home to an area they considered safer, only to be caught in a bombing at the hospital that killed a family member.
An air strike killed three children in their bedroom. Three more strikes in the afternoon killed an additional four children. And after 9pm an artillery shell killed eight people in their home, including four children.
Families continued to stream into already crowded Gaza City from the north and east and into cities farther down the coast to escape shelling along the strip’s perimeter. Donkey carts loaded with children and elderly people side Israel and the impact could be heard in the west.
After Friday prayers in Gaza City, there were more people venturing out to sit on shady stoeps or to queue for bread than had been seen during the first week of the Israeli bombardments, which seemed strange during an escalation.