Gaza has been turned into a cemetery due to Israel’s intentional war crimes: indiscriminate bombing, targeting civilians, destroying homes, and using hunger stars as weapons.
This calculated cruelty led to the massacre of tens of thousands, trapping the population in living hell. The silence of the world allows only this continuous genocide.
This is the Guardian’s report revealing the full scale of a horrifying devastation.
Viewed from the sky, Gaza looks like the ruins of an ancient civilization that has been brought to life after darkness for centuries. A patchwork of the neighborhood with concrete shapes and crushed walls, craters, tiled rubs, and roads leading to everywhere. The city’s wreckage has been wiped out.
However, there was no slow natural disasters or time.
Gaza was a lively and lively place up until two years ago, due to all the challenges its residents had endured. The market was crowded and the way it was full of kids. Gaza is gone – not buried under the ash and erased by history, but destroyed by Israeli military campaigns that left behind a place that seemed to be the aftermath of the Apocalypse.
The Guardians were granted permission to provide assistance on Jordanian military aircraft on Tuesday. Israel announced last week that it has resumed its coordinated humanitarian atmosphere in Gaza. It reached such a crisis that hunger is currently unfolding after increasing international pressure on serious food and medical supplies.
The flight provided an unusual opportunity to observe the territory, which has been largely sealed off by international media since October 7th, and subsequently launched by Israel. Following the Hamas-led attack that day, Israel banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza. This is an unprecedented move in modern conflict history, marking one of the rare moments when reporters were denied access to a lively war zone.
Even at an altitude of around 2,000 feet (600 meters) we could get a glimpse into where we mark some of the most devastating chapters of the conflict.
These are places of bombing and siege bravely documented by Palestinian journalists. More than 230 Palestinian reporters are buried under a hastily excavated cemetery.
About an hour and a half after takeoff, the plane flew through the abandoned ports of northern Gaza and Gaza city, and is now a wasteland that is crumbling with concrete and dust. The building was flattened by tiled rubs, roads drilling holes with craters, and the entire neighborhood was flattened. From this distance it is almost impossible to see the inhabitants of Gaza. Only through a nearly 400mm camera lens can we create small groups standing among the ruins of a crushed landscape.
Humanitarian agencies warn that hunger is rapidly expanding its territory. Airdrops can create the perception that something is going on, but they are costly, inefficient, and not close to the amount of aid the track can convey, due to general consensus. Israeli data shows that in the first 21 months of the war, 104 days of airdrop provided the equivalent of Gaza’s four-day food.
They could be fatal too. Last year, at least 12 people owned trying to retrieve food that had landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when the pallet fell on them.
Further south, the plane passes through Deial Bala in central Gaza. There, in the lower Baraka area, on May 22, 11-year-old Yakinhamad, known as Gaza’s youngest social media influencer, was killed after a series of Israeli airstrikes raids hit her home, boning down flowers with a small green patch that was excluded from the evacuation camp.
A few more kilometers away, the aircraft flew near Khan Eunice and was surrounded for months by Israeli forces in the midst of fierce battles in and around the hospital. Somewhere in the northern suburbs is the home of Dr. Araa Al Najal, a Palestinian pediatrician who worked at Altaril Hospital, part of the Nasser Medical Complex. Her home was bombed during her shift in May. Her husband and nine of the 10 children were killed in the attack.
From the sky, it surprises how small Gaza is. It is a small piece of land that has been the setting for the world’s most bloody conflict. The territory is more than four times that of London. More than 60,000 people have been killed in Israel’s strikes in this small corner of the Middle East, health officials say. It is estimated that thousands more will remain buried under the tiled rub.
A few hundred metres below us, the Guardian reporter is a journalist and survivor and works in one of her dispatches. Most of her fellow reporters, editors and other colleagues have yet to meet Tantesh due to Israel’s lockdown, which makes it impossible for the people of Gaza to leave. She evacuated multiple times, lived without reliable access to food and water, losing relatives, friends and her home in combat. It’s a strange and unforgettable feeling to receive a message from her as the Jordanian aircraft flies up.
When our aircraft returns to Jordan, the soldiers on board point to the hazy horizon south. “It’s Rafa,” he says.
Rafa, the southernmost part of Gaza, is currently largely destroyed, and hundreds of people have died of meals as the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation took over food delivery in May. Just a few kilometres east within the crater-pocked hills, lie where Israeli military forces attacked a fleet of Palestinian emergency vehicles on March 23rd, killing 15 medical workers and rescue workers who were later buried in mass graves.
The same question appears to remain among a handful of reporters on the flight after landing at the air base of King Abdullah II of Gabawi.
And what more will be destroyed when many are already lost after seeing this desert of crushed stones and tombs?