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Published On 4 Nov 2023
Mohammed has spent his whole life in the besieged Gaza Strip, barring a trip to the Israeli city of Herzliya to receive medical treatment that has since morphed into a nightmare.
On October 7, an unprecedented attack by Hamas launched on Israeli army outposts and surrounding villages in southern Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 people. More than 200 Israelis — including dual nationals — were taken captive and brought to Gaza. Hamas said its actions were in response to what it described as decades of atrocities committed against Palestinians and their holy sites.
Since then, more than 9,200 people in Gaza, including at least 3,800 children, have been killed by Israeli air strikes and, now, a ground invasion.
They are all waiting to die’
The volunteers running the the camp in Nablus have told him and other people there that their resources are running out and the camp may not be able to stay open much longer.
“Any second now they [Israeli forces] could detain me,” the man told us. He hadn’t committed any crime, he said, but they could still “detain me, torture me or do anything to me”.
“For all us workers here in Nablus, we’re basically just bodies without souls,” he added. “Everybody’s just worried about their family, and we are very anxious and stressed.
But the war has also separated thousands of Palestinian family members from each other, including children like Mohammed, who was forced by Israeli soldiers to cross into the occupied West Bank from Israel, while his family is in Gaza.
The United Nations has estimated that more than 45 percent of homes and a significant proportion of civilian infrastructure in Gaza have been flattened by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing.
Two hours after Al Jazeera spoke with him at a temporary camp in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, we were informed that Mohammed’s younger brother and sister had been killed in an Israeli air strike on his home in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
So far, volunteers running the site housing stranded workers from Gaza have been unable to summon the courage to break the news to him.
The camp at the Nablus Municipal Stadium, where residents of Gaza are stranded, unable to return home to their families [Al Jazeera]
