WASHINGTON — Palestinians in Gaza say they have nowhere to go to escape Israeli airstrikes as border crossings into Israel and Egypt are closed.
Israel stepped up airstrikes on the Gaza Strip this week and sealed it off from food, fuel and water supplies following Saturday’s deadly attack in Israel.
Gaza resident Nowar Diab, a member of the Palestinian advocacy group, We Are Not Numbers, or WANN, told VOA on Monday the bombardments are literally “everywhere,” but people cannot escape because border crossings are closed.
“We don’t have any place to go,” she said. “We don’t have shelters, so you try to go to any relative’s place, or friends.”
Israel launched the airstrikes in retaliation for Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel near the Gaza border, but Diab took issue with calling the assault an incursion “because this land, the whole land is like, our land.”
Diab said it’s the first time in many years, “that Palestinians have taken a step” and that for the first time “it feels like we’re not the victims.”
Diab added that she doesn’t support “killing the innocent whether from their side or our side,” she said. “It’s completely unfair for innocent people to die but mind you, we have been living in this situation forever.”
Shahd Safi, a freelance journalist based in Gaza said, “there are many people who are being killed; only a few get warnings.”
She told VOA she feels lucky she was warned that her building was targeted in an airstrike earlier this week.
“The other day we had to evacuate, we got a warning and my family and I evacuated because they wanted to bomb the building we’re living in,” she said.
Safi said a few minutes afterward, she heard her building was bombed.
“The feeling you get is extremely scary, you start to tremble, and you’re worried about yourself and your family,” she said.
She said she has seen huge plumes of black smoke in the sky several times after bombings.
Safi said three journalist friends were killed during the airstrikes and that there were “many injured.”
Palestinian journalists are very “socially cohesive,” Diab said, adding, “If anyone departs from us, it’s really a big deal for all of us.”
“You live with the fear that you’re going to be killed all the time because we have no shelters in Gaza,” she said.
Diab told VOA that Gaza residents had no inkling that Hamas had planned an assault on Israeli civilians before it was carried out on Saturday.
The attack by Hamas and subsequent retaliation claimed the lives of more than 2,200 on both sides.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, leader of the opposition National Unity Party, reached a deal Wednesday to form a unity government. Both leaders said the new government would pursue only legislation or government decisions regarding the conflict and have formed a war-time Cabinet.
Israel has massed troops near the Gaza Strip and called up hundreds of reservists ahead of an expected offensive against Hamas militants.
Since the Hamas attack during the weekend, Israel has so far received international support, including from the U.S. with President Joe Biden making at least the fourth call on Wednesday to Netanyahu since the attack Saturday. The first plane carrying U.S. ammunition touched down in Israel Wednesday before a visit by the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
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