Israeli bombardments plunged Gaza's Palestinians back into a nightmare. On Tuesday, March 18, an Al-Jazeera camera filmed the corpses lined up, wrapped in blankets, in the courtyard of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. A man pointed to a smaller body, with a pink sweater – "children!" he shouted. According to a journalist on the scene, Anas al-Sharif, around 50 bodies had been brought to this hospital, after a series of bombardments on the city. The enclave's Ministry of Health announced in the morning that 404 bodies had been taken to hospitals, along with 562 wounded.
"God, it's hard, it's harder than before," Mohamed Daher, a 24-year-old Gazan who was studying law before the war, wrote to Le Monde. The Israeli authorities still forbid foreign press access to the Palestinian enclave. Daher returned to camp in the ruins of his home in the Shujaiya neighborhood, one of the most devastated areas of Gaza as it is close to Israeli territory in the northeast. "We were woken up by a series of bombings. I was overcome with fear. I've lived through wars and I'm used to explosions. But these bombings were terrifying." In the same area, hundreds of families were again forced to leave the town of Beit Hanoun after compulsory evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army, which described the region as a "dangerous combat zone."
In a voice message published on X by British NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, American-Palestinian pediatrician Tanya Haj-Hassan described the "chaos" in the emergency department of Nasser Hospital, the largest in southern Gaza. "Patients everywhere on the floor. There were probably three men and the rest were all children, women, elderly. Everybody [was] caught in their sleep, still wrapped in their blankets," she reported, adding, "All the pediatric ICU beds are full now (...) I personally unfortunately cared for at least four or five patients that died."
'People are on edge'
"Medical facilities across the Gaza Strip are overwhelmed" after the latest Israeli bombardments, said the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The organization stressed that the bombing is "compounding a desperate situation" due to a lack of medical supplies, as the Israeli government has been blocking the entry of all aid into the Palestinian territory since March 2.
You have 37.21% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.