It's been 10 months since the 7 October attacks.
As of 1 July 2024, of the 251 people kidnapped by Hamas,
116 still remain unaccounted for. Evidence is coming out that some of the victims of the attacks were victims of 'friendly fire' as the Israeli army used the
Hannibal Directive, where people are killed rather than being allowed to be taken hostage. While information is still extremely scant, eye-witnesses report that 13 people in the Be-eri kibbutz were killed when an
Israeli tank fired on the building they were being held hostage in, rather than try to save them. Other examples can be found on
Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza is indescribable. Data are from the
UCHA update 200, OCHA
reported impact snapshot and OCHA
humanitarian response update except where otherwise stated.
Casualties
As of 5 August 2024, the Ministry of Health has reported,
- 39,623 Palestinians killed
- 91,469 Palestinians injured
- 10,000 missing or buried under rubble
Displacement
- 1.9 million people have been internally displaced (90% of the population)
Infrastructure
- >60% of residential buildings have been destroyed or damaged (as of January 2024, more recent figures are hard to come by)
- >80% of commercial buildings have been damaged or destroyed (as of January 2024, more recent figures are hard to come by)
- >65% of roads have been damaged or destroyed (as of 29 May 2024)
- there has been no electricity from the grid since October 7 2023
- water supplies are at about a quarter of the pre-October 7 volume
- two-thirds of water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged due to the conflict (
source)
Waste
- there are 395,000 tons of solid waste and two of the main landfill sites are off-limits, meaning informal sites have sprung up (
Source)
- all five of the territory’s wastewater treatment facilities have been damaged or destroyed (
Source)
- it will take
over a decade to clear the rubble in Gaza and cost between $500 and $600 million according to the UN (
Source)
Health and Medical Care
- 20 out of the 36 hospitals in Gaza are non-operational
- 16 hospitals are partly functioning
- 8 field hospitals are functional, 4 fully and 4 partially
- The lack of access to clean water, hygiene kits, and sanitation facilities continues to pose major health risks and drive a surge in infections and illnesses, exacerbated by poor living conditions.
- as of 7 July 2024 there have been around 995,000 cases of acute respiratory infections, 577,000 cases of acute watery diarrhoea, and 107,000 cases of acute jaundice syndrome
- 1.2 million doses of
polio vaccine are being sent to Gaza as it has been detected in waste water (
Source)
- over 500 medical workers have been killed and over 300 detained by the Israeli military (
Source)
The U.N. Human Rights Office said it had gathered “credible information” that Israeli military raids on hospitals had often led “to mass detention and enforced disappearances, including of medical staff.” The “systematic attacks on hospitals” and the killing, detention and enforced disappearance of health workers had a devastating impact on the people,” the U.N. body said in a statement on June 25.
Food and Nutrition
- 65% of cropland has been damaged
- 33% of greenhouse area has been damaged
- 60-70% of meat and dairy-producing livestock has been killed or prematurely slaughtered
- 96% of the population is protected to face crisis or worse levels of food insecurity
- over 96% of women and young children are not meeting their nutrient requirements
- >50,000 children are estimated to require treatment for acute malnutrition this year
- kitchens are struggling to feed people, due to a lack of access to supplies and the need to keep relocating due to evacuation orders
- The UN declared last month that famine is widespread in Gaza as people are dying from starvation and malnutrition (
Source)
Children and Education
- around 17,000 children are accompanied or separated
- all 625,000 school children in Gaza have lost a full scholastic year
- as of 30 July, 9,211 school children and 397 teachers have been killed and more than 14,200 students and 2,200 teachers have been injured
- nearly 93 per cent of school buildings assessed as directly hit, damaged or likely damaged
Last year the Lancet published a paper that found
no evidence that the Ministry of Health (MoH) was inflating the deaths in Gaza. Last month it published a paper that showed the MoH's death toll is likely an
underestimate.
Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.
Imprisonment
Multiple reports are being published of the degradation and abuse that people are being subjected to when detained by the Israeli military. The
New York Times published a story about the Sde Teiman army base, where a military hanger is being used to detain Gazans, over 4,000 as of May this year.
A three-month investigation by The New York Times — based on interviews with former detainees and with Israeli military officers, doctors and soldiers who served at the site; the visit to the base; and data about released detainees provided by the military — found those 1,200 Palestinian civilians have been held at Sde Teiman in demeaning conditions without the ability to plead their cases to a judge for up to 75 days. Detainees are also denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days and their location is withheld from rights groups as well as from the International Committee of the Red Cross, in what some legal experts say is a contravention of international law.
...
Yoel Donchin, a military doctor serving at the site, said it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had captured many of the people he treated there, some of whom were highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war. One was paraplegic, another weighed roughly 300 pounds and a third had breathed since childhood through a tube inserted into his neck, he said.
“Why they brought him — I don’t know,” Dr. Donchin said.
“They take everyone,” he added.
...
Inside Sde Teiman, [one of the detainees] Mr. Bakr was held in an open-sided hangar where he said he was forced, with hundreds of others, to sit handcuffed in silence on a mat for up to 18 hours a day. The hangar had no external wall, leaving it open to the rain and the cold, and guards watched him from the other side of a mesh fence.
All the detainees wore blindfolds — except for one, known by the Arabic word “shawish,” which means sergeant. The shawish acted as a go-between the soldiers and the prisoners, doling out food and escorting fellow prisoners to a block of portable toilets in the corner of the hangar.
...
[Another detainee] Mr. al-Hamlawi, the senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.”
A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.
Mr. al-Hamlawi recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that, after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days. [my emphasis]
The
Guardian has also undertaken research into the treatment of detainees,
Prisoners said they were subjected to regular severe, arbitrary violence, including sexual assault. None of the prisoners interviewed by the Guardian left detention without experiencing or witnessing some form of attack. Other abuse and humiliation was constant, from starvation rations to denial of access to basic hygiene supplies including sanitary pads for women, soap, towels, clothes and clean water for drinking and showers.
The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has presided, with vocal pride, over the grim transformation of Israel’s prison system... Ben-Gvir also confirmed in a recent letter to the supreme court that food deprivation was ordered from the top. “There is no starvation, but my policy does call for reducing conditions, including food and calories.”
He appears to be so closely linked to abuse that far-right social networks share pictures of emaciated detainees with captions joking about a Ben-Gvir weight-loss plan.
Meanwhile
Haaretz has an interview with a Palestinian from the West Bank who was detained prior to October 7 and released in April of this year.
On October 29, the inmates of Abu Halil's cell requested a squeegee to wash the floor. The response to that was to send the terrifying Keter unit into their cell. "Now you will be like dogs," the guards ordered. The prisoners' hands were cuffed behind their back. Even before they were shackled, they were ordered to move only with their upper body bent over. They were led to the kitchen, where they were stripped and forced to lie one on top of the other, a pile of 10 naked prisoners. Abu Halil was the last. There, they were beaten with clubs and spat on.
A guard then started to stuff carrots into the anus of Abu Halil and other prisoners. Sitting at home now, reciting his story, Abu Halil lowers his gaze and the flow of words slows down. He's embarrassed to talk about this. Afterward, he continues, dogs hunched over them and attacked them. They were then allowed to put on their underwear before being led back to their cell, where they found their clothes thrown into a heap.
...
November 5. It was a Sunday afternoon, he recalls. The administration decided to move the Hamas prisoners from Block 5 to Block 6. The inmates of cells 10, 11 and 12 were ordered to come out with hands bound behind their back and the usual hunched-over walk. Five guards, whose names Abu Halil provides, took them to the kitchen. Again they were stripped. This time they were kicked in the testicles. The guards would lunge at them and kick, lunge and kick, again and again. Nonstop brutality for 25 minutes. "We are Bruce Lee," the guards proclaimed. They shook them and shoved them around like balls from one corner of the room to the other, then moved them to their new cells in Block 6. [my emphasis]
