Naijahood
In Gaza, Palestinians found themselves seeking refuge in hospitals and schools as they faced dire shortages of food and water on October 16. This crisis emerged as over a million people had evacuated their homes in anticipation of an Israeli ground invasion designed to dismantle Hamas, which had recently carried out attacks in southern Israel.
A particularly distressing situation unfolded within U.N. facilities, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were reportedly subsisting on less than a liter of water per day. Meanwhile, Gaza’s hospitals teetered on the brink of collapse. Emergency generators that powered life-saving equipment, such as ventilators and incubators, were running on just one day’s worth of fuel. Additionally, supplies of essential medicines were nearly depleted.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the ongoing conflict had resulted in the tragic loss of 2,750 Palestinian lives and left 9,700 individuals wounded. These casualties exceeded those of the 2014 Gaza war, which extended for more than six weeks, marking this as the deadliest conflict in Gaza to date, affecting both Palestinian and Israeli communities.
On the Israeli side, over 1,400 lives had been lost, primarily among civilians during Hamas’s October 7 assault. The Israeli military, on Monday, disclosed that they had identified at least 199 hostages in Gaza, a number that surpassed previous estimates.
In response to the escalating situation, Israel had ordered the evacuation of over a million Palestinians, roughly half of Gaza’s population, from Gaza City and its surrounding regions to the southern part of the enclave. The military’s stated goal was to clear civilians from the area, in preparation for a major campaign against Hamas in the north, where the militants were believed to have established extensive networks of tunnels and rocket launchers.
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