Storm Byron wreaks havoc in the devastated Gaza Strip after more than two years of Israeli destruction. The heavy rains began to ease, but this Friday the authorities discovered the devastating consequences of the peak intensity of the previous hours in a territory with hundreds of thousands of people living in tents and more than 90% of buildings damaged or destroyed. Since Thursday, 14 people, including three children, have lost their lives due to landslides caused by wind and rain, or by hypothermia, according to the count published by the Hamas government’s Interior Ministry. At least 13 properties collapsed. Emergency services counted 4,300 telephone requests for help and 27,000 tents that had become useless, flooded or swept away by water or violent winds.
Civil Defense spokesman Mahmud Basal said a house previously damaged by bombing had collapsed on a family, killing six of its members. Also a wall, above a tent. With few resources, rescue teams took hours to extract six injured people from the rubble. They were the survivors of a family of eight living in a five-story building that collapsed in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the country.
The vast majority of victims were recorded this Friday. The last girl to die of hypothermia was Hadil al Masri, according to hospital sources. He was nine years old and living with his family in a shelter for displaced people. Still in the capital and due to hypothermia, a baby died a few hours earlier: Taim al Jawaja. They join Rahaf Abu Jazar, the eight-month-old baby who “suddenly died of cold” while sleeping unprotected, according to his mother, Hejar Abu Jazar.
These are the consequences of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government’s decision to make Gaza uninhabitable, not only through bombing, but also through bulldozing and controlled explosions, in destruction unprecedented since World War II. The UN estimates that there are 300,000 tents, mobile homes and caravans that the population needs and to which the Israeli authorities are blocking entry, despite the ceasefire in force since October. Some of those used by Gazans today are more of a collection of plastics and pieces of steel salvaged from the rubble. Hani Ziara, a father who took refuge in Gaza City after the destruction of his house a few months ago, illustrated this to the Al Jazeera network: “When the wind rises, we hold all the stakes to prevent the tent from falling.”
The tragedy is also the result of Israel’s refusal to allow the entry of heavy machinery or water pumping, which it justifies by the risk that they end up in the hands of Palestinian militias, mainly Hamas. In Beit Lahiya, the videos show the attempt to access the buried with just shovels and a radial.
The International Organization for Migration regretted the delay in the arrival of strengthening materials for fragile shelters, such as wooden panels and plywood, as well as sandbags and water pumps to help in case of flooding. Its weakness mainly affects the nearly 795,000 displaced people (more than a third of Gaza’s population) who live in misery in low-lying areas full of rubble. They are at greater risk of flooding, due to lack of drainage or protective barriers.
The head of operations of the World Health Organization, Rik Peeperkorn, also stressed in a teleconference from Geneva that the combination of Storm Byron (and winter conditions in general) with the lack of water and sanitation will lead to “an increase in acute respiratory infections, including influenza, as well as hepatitis and diarrheal diseases”, reports the Efe agency.
These will be the new invisible death of the Israeli invasion, those who lose their lives because of the circumstances it created, like those of Byron these days. Another 383 have been killed by Israeli fire during the more than two months of permanent truce, during which the Israeli army has significantly reduced its attacks and withdrawn from 58% of the Gaza Strip, but continues to bomb or shoot daily. On October 29, after announcing the loss of a soldier in a Hamas ambush, the armed forces there launched a wave of bombings that left 104 dead; 46 were children and 20 were women. Hours later, Netanyahu announced that the ceasefire was “back in effect.”
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