The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza continues. Despite the ceasefire agreement reached a month ago, Israel maintains its siege of the Strip, and allows humanitarian aid to enter only in trickles, keeping the population in a state of poverty. Gas cylinders have become scarce, and wood is too expensive for residents who have been living in precarious conditions for months. To secure food for their families, many Palestinian children go out every day in search of any material that can light a fire and allow cooking to take place.
Al-Maghazi refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, houses families from the north of the Strip. At the entrance a kind of improvised dump was formed. Here Saleh Wadia, 10 years old, comes out, pulling a cart full of debris.
“I come here every day,” the boy says. “I collect everything that can start a fire to make bread. We don’t have enough money to buy firewood.” “So every day I spend at least an hour here before I go back to our tent so my mother can prepare food or tea for us.”
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Fajr Al-Daya, 13, also rummages through the dumpster looking for flammable items. “It takes about US$15 a day (US$80 daily average) to start a fire with wood,” he says. “We don’t have the money for that.” “Before that, my father sold cars in Gaza City,” the teenager recalls. “He had his own car, which was very beautiful. But it all ended with the war. We also had a house and land. The house was destroyed and the land was on the other side of the yellow line.”
The so-called yellow line today divides the enclave into two parts and represents the area of the Gaza Strip under Israeli control since the beginning of the truce with the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas on October 10.
Children killed by drones while bringing firewood
Two days ago, Israeli drones killed two children, ages 8 and 10. According to their uncle Alaa Abu Assi, they crossed this particular symbolic line to search for wood. He told Agence France-Presse: “We went to look for them and found them cut up.”
The IDF states only that soldiers “identified two suspects who crossed the yellow line.” According to the army, the suspects “approached the forces and posed a direct threat.”
The boys’ uncle said: “They were innocent. They were not carrying any kind of bombs or missiles.”
Since the fragile ceasefire came into effect, there have been several fatal incidents in which Israeli forces opened fire on people in the Yellow Line area. The ceasefire ended two years of war in Gaza, which began after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, but the situation of residents remains precarious.