On Wednesday, August 21, the latest Israeli evacuation warnings fell out of the sky over the most crowded part of Gaza, Deir al-Balah in the center of the besieged enclave. The leaflets and phone calls from the Israeli army referenced a map informing people which numbered block would be targeted for an imminent invasion. These are the tools the Israeli army uses to control where people in Gaza move, forcing them to evacuate from one area to another over and over again.
In a press release last Sunday, the Deir al-Balah municipality said that the waves of evacuation reaching Deir al-Balah were housing an unprecedented number of displaced people cramped into a tiny zone. According to the statement, Deir al-Balah’s total area is 42 square kilometers, and almost a million displaced people are distributed across 200 displacement centers
On Tuesday, the Israeli army bombed the local market in Deir al-Balah, killing 9 civilians. Several hours later, the army bombarded a school in Gaza City sheltering 700 people, killing 10 people, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense.
During the writing of this report on Wednesday, the Israeli army bombed another school in the Jalaa’ area in Gaza City, killing three people. The army warned people via phone calls to evacuate the area only 5 minutes before the bombardment occurred. Survivors of the bombing at the targeted shelter, the Salah al-Din School, relayed their testimonies to Mondoweiss.
You can find testimonies from the survivors of the Deir al-Balah and the Jalaa’ bombings in the article
There’s nowhere safe. I don’t know what to say, do, or feel anymore.
There’s a Travis song that’s been springing to my mind as of late, which summarizes my numb thoughts:
“Half a million, civilians gonna die today because they looked the wrong way, you read it in the headlines, watch it on the TV, put it in the background…”
How do we keep processing all of this? It just keeps coming.
We’re living through a modern holocaust. Let’s just make sure we have no regrets about how we behaved.
