Burning pieces of plastic and cardboard in a large can in front of his family’s tent in a cemetery in southern Gaza, Raed Abu Ouda prepares a meal for his children, remembering a time when they did not have to live this way.
“We used to live in palaces, but now we live in tombs,” said Abu Ouda, 42. who said he was injured in February when a projectile hit his home despite an ongoing ceasefire, told NBC News this week. His family’s tent is one of several built in an area used as a cemetery outside the Jordanian field hospital in Khan Younis.
The cemetery, he said, was the best refuge his family could find, as thousands of Palestinians still cannot return to their homes, or at least what remains of them, because they are behind the “yellow line,” a border that delimits the territory still occupied by Israeli forces, which comprises about half of Gaza.
“We have become people living in unnatural conditions,” said Abu Ouda, who lost his job as a farmer after the conflict in Gaza began. Describing the daily struggle to get food, water and the most basic supplies for survival in the Palestinian enclave, five months after the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, he wondered how he was supposed to support his family of seven, including his youngest child, one-year-old Arwa.
“I can’t even provide them with a single jerrycan of water,” he said.
Hopes that the ceasefire, brokered in part by President Donald Trump, would advance and that the process of rebuilding Gaza could begin after more than two years of war rose after Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, unveiled plans for the future of the enclave, marked by gleaming high-rise towers and tourist-filled beaches. Kushner had outlined a timeline of a few years for reconstruction despite the ongoing attacks in Gaza, but large-scale work has not yet begun.
Now, a broader war consumes the region after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran last month, prompting retaliatory attacks by Tehran and its allies. Palestinians in the battered enclave fear they have been forgotten as progress in advancing the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas has been largely sidelined by the latest hostilities. Key obstacles include the future disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from areas that are still occupied.
“The war involving Iran has had a major impact on Gaza,” Doaa Basam, a 26-year-old pharmacist displaced from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza to Khan Younis, told NBC News on Wednesday.
Basam noticed a continuous “Shortage of many essential supplies,” including adequate food and medicine.
The Kerem Shalom crossing is currently the only operational route into and out of Gaza. Israel closed the Rafah crossing with Egypt “until further notice” when conflict with Iran erupted, citing security fears, just weeks after it was reopened under the ceasefire deal.
Meanwhile, fears have grown over future aid access in the enclave after Israel banned dozens of humanitarian organisations, including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, from operating in the Palestinian territories over their refusal to cooperate with new vetting rules that would have forced them to provide lists of their staff. as well as your personal information.
The Israeli government said the rules were implemented for security reasons, to rule out any links to terrorism among aid workers.
Israel’s top court issued a temporary injunction to allow the organizations to continue most of their activities while it evaluates a petition from 17 aid groups challenging government ban, but no decision has yet been made on the case.
At a news conference on Wednesday, UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said the “current restrictions on aid operations” were “worsening an already critical humanitarian situation.”
Between February 27 and March 5, just over 3,400 pallets of aid administered by the UN and its partners were unloaded at Gaza crossings. according to an update published March 6 by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This is equivalent to about 485 pallets a day, of which about 70% contain food supplies, according to OCHA.
The figures represent a significant decrease from the average during the period since the ceasefire came into force, with an average of 2,240 pallets per day delivered during the period between October 10 and March 5. However, those figures only refer to aid administered by the UN and its partners.
OCHA warned a week ago that even before the crossing closures and challenges posed by the Iran conflict, additional food supplies were “urgently” needed to ensure partners had sufficient stocks to sustain distributions, and its partners’ operations met “only 50 percent of the minimum caloric needs” of 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2 million residents.
OCHA also noted that medical evacuations out of Gaza were also suspended amid the Iran war, while only “a limited number of commercial supplies have been allowed in,” and delays caused fuel shortages, raised prices and increased dependence on humanitarian aid.
When asked when the other crossings into Gaza might reopen and how much aid overall was coming to Gaza since the ceasefire began and since the war with Iran began, COGAT, the Israeli military’s liaison to the Palestinians, did not respond.
COGAT said earlier this month that it would continue to facilitate the entry of aid into Gaza in accordance with its “commitments and subject to the necessary security restrictions arising from the security situation.”
Meanwhile, deadly Israeli airstrikes have continued and more than 650 people have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire began, according to the Ministry of Health in the enclave, while the majority of the population remains internally displaced and living in makeshift shelters.
“People are still languishing in tents (almost) six months after this so-called ceasefire was established,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former adviser to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
He added: “The ceasefire has become a new term for more killing, and everyone’s attention is focused elsewhere, on Iran.”
“God willing, the war will end,” said Abu Ouda, the father who lives with his family in the Khan Younis cemetery. Until then, he said, his family will continue to “suffer unimaginably.”
“Suffering to find water, suffering to find something to drink, something to eat, something to wear,” he said.
“Everything is suffering.”
