A week after Hamas made a surprise assault on Jewish bases and towns surrounding Gaza and murdered 1,300 people, another 2,200 have died in the strip and a million – almost half of the population – have had to flee their homes because they have been destroyed or the Israeli army has urged them to do so “for their safety.”
The situation on the strip is getting worse without remedy. The Israeli blockade depletes food and water reserves and worsens the suffering of civilians. Furthermore, the army, which had guaranteed the protection of the caravans heading south, attacked one of them on Friday, causing dozens of victims, including women and children. The bomb fell on the open bed of a truck in which about 30 people were traveling. At least 12 lost their lives instantly. At least 320 people have died in the last 24 hours alone.
The images of the ruin and hardship of the Gazan population without hardly any light or water, short on food and medicine, subjected to incessant bombardment, have entered every home in the Middle East and encourage the anger of Arab societies against Israel.
The networks broadcast live from the strip the exodus of the population, a forced displacement that, as commentators frequently repeat, is a war crime. It doesn't matter that Israel claims that they are not the enemy and that it will not attack them. Reality contradicts this and the relationship with a second nakba is recurrent. The deportation in 1948 of some 700,000 Palestinians from the territory that forms Israel finds its echo today in Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands of people, according to the UN, have headed to the south of the strip, where there is almost nothing to accommodate them. The lucky ones have settled in relatives' homes, in schools and hospitals, the less fortunate have slept outdoors, under plastic, feeding with what they have been able to take with them.
They all lack water. The three desalination plants are not working. People drink from wells that are not healthy. The UN warns that restoring drinking water service from Israel is “a matter of life or death.” Without water, infections spread and without water there is no bread or hummus, the foods that sustain the 2.1 million Gazans.
This humanitarian crisis raises the risk that the conflict will spread throughout the region. If it ends up happening, it will depend, to a large extent, on how the ground offensive develops, on how many civilians are caught in the crossfire of the neighborhood-by-neighborhood and street-by-street fighting.
Israel has brought the tanks and armored vehicles closer to a few meters from the Erez border crossing. Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu visited his troops next to Gaza and said that the order to invade could be given at any time. It was the first time I had gone since the Hamas offensive.
As Israel prepares to invade Gaza, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, spoke by phone last night both with Netanyahu, to ask him to provide resources for the civilian population, and with the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who told him conveyed his total disagreement with the forced displacement of half of the population of Gaza.
For his part, Antony Blinken, Secretary of State of the United States, has made an express tour of various Arab capitals where he has received the same message: it is necessary to "avoid further suffering of civilians." This was repeated yesterday in Riyadh by Faisal bin Farhan, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia.
Blinken agreed – he has already told Israel to respect the rules of war – but failed to get Bin Farhan to expressly condemn the Hamas assault and the murder of 1,300 Israelis. Despite the fact that almost all of these deaths were also civilians, Saudi Arabia refuses to say anything against the Islamist movement, responsible for the most tragic day in Israel's history.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, countries that have signed friendship agreements with Israel in recent years, have not come to its defense this time. Nor have Türkiye, Qatar and Kuwait. They have limited themselves, like Egypt, to condemning all violence.
Jordan, which with Egypt is the only Arab country that has diplomatic relations with Israel, has blamed it for instigating the Hamas uprising with its policies of oppression of the Palestinian people. Three million Palestinians live in Jordan, almost a quarter of the population.
Israel could not expect support from Iran, Syria or Algeria, nor from Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, which have also condemned it, but it has understood that until it resolves the Palestinian problem it will not be able to have a normal relationship even with its best neighbors, which They fear any popular uprising, especially after the Arab Spring of 2011. Under this geostrategic reality, the drama of the victims and the ambition of the combatants extends.
