Gaza’s Displaced Residents Tell of Fear and Abandonment

This picture taken on November 12, 2023 from a position along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel shows a smoke plume erupting during Israeli bombardment on the Palestinian enclave amid ongoing battles. (AFP)
This picture taken on November 12, 2023 from a position along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel shows a smoke plume erupting during Israeli bombardment on the Palestinian enclave amid ongoing battles. (AFP)
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Gaza’s Displaced Residents Tell of Fear and Abandonment

This picture taken on November 12, 2023 from a position along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel shows a smoke plume erupting during Israeli bombardment on the Palestinian enclave amid ongoing battles. (AFP)
This picture taken on November 12, 2023 from a position along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel shows a smoke plume erupting during Israeli bombardment on the Palestinian enclave amid ongoing battles. (AFP)

On foot, by horse-drawn cart and clinging to the sides of overcrowded trucks, Palestinians on Sunday fled southwards through Gaza to escape Israeli air strikes, telling of their fear, despair and bitter sense of abandonment.

"Nowhere is safe in Gaza. My son was injured and there was not a single hospital I could take him to so he could get stitches," said displaced Palestinian Ahmed al-Kahlout. "There is no water, there isn’t even salt water we can wash our hands with."

He had been forced to leave his home to search for basic necessities for his family while "there are bodies filling Gaza's streets".

There are still people hoping the conflict will be solved soon, he said.

"But only God knows if it’ll be solved. The whole world has let us down, the progressive world that boasts about human rights has let us down."

Also heading south, a Palestinian woman, Mariam al-Borno, said death, displacement and hunger had forced her and her children to leave home "to flee for our lives."

"We saw death with our own eyes. Throughout it all we were afraid."

People at a United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) school in Beit Lahia, where they had sought shelter, were looking at a crater left by an explosion.

"Even at UNRWA shelters we can't find safety," said one man.

"I'm just searching for a safe place, nothing more, to save myself and my children," he said.

Outside Gaza's largest hospital, Al Shifa, entertainer Alaa Miqdad gathered displaced children and put on a clown show.

"Despite the pain we are living in and the hurt, we will smile through the pain," he said.

But Ismail al-Najjar, whose family's residential compound in Khan Younis in the south was hit by an air strike, was less sanguine.

"I was coming with my horse, I stopped the horse, the aircraft came and fired something ... there was bombardment everywhere."

"It is not just destruction; it is an earthquake ... I ask God to take vengeance on the killers of children," he said.



Some Defiant South Lebanese Stay Put in Face of Israeli Fire

Health ministry figures reveal at least 1,829 people have been killed inside Lebanon since Israel's full scare war started - AFP
Health ministry figures reveal at least 1,829 people have been killed inside Lebanon since Israel's full scare war started - AFP
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Some Defiant South Lebanese Stay Put in Face of Israeli Fire

Health ministry figures reveal at least 1,829 people have been killed inside Lebanon since Israel's full scare war started - AFP
Health ministry figures reveal at least 1,829 people have been killed inside Lebanon since Israel's full scare war started - AFP

Cattle farmer Khairallah Yaacoub refused to leave south Lebanon despite a year of Hezbollah-Israel clashes. When full-scale war erupted, he and four others were stranded in their ruined border village.

Yaacoub is among a handful of villagers in the war-battered south who have tried to stay put despite the Israeli onslaught.

He finally fled Hula village only after being wounded by shrapnel and losing half of his 16-strong herd to Israeli strikes.

They had been marooned by constant bombardment and with rubble-strewn access roads all but unpassable.

The two of the five remaining had no mobile phones and could not be located.

"I wanted to stay with the cows, my livelihood. But in the end I had to leave them too because I was injured," Yaacoub, 55, told AFP.

With no immediate access to a hospital, he had to remove the shrapnel himself using a knife to cauterise his wound and then apply herbal medicine to it.

"It was difficult for me to leave my house because warplanes were constantly circling above our heads and bombing around us," he said, describing weeks of sleepless nights amid intense strikes.

Now north of Beirut, Yaacoub said he dreams of returning home.

"When I arrived in Beirut, I wished I'd died in Hula and never left," he said.

"If there's a ceasefire, I will return to Hula that very night. I'm very attached to the village."

- 'Smoke shisha' -

On September 23, Israel began an air campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah strongholds and later launched ground incursions.

According to an AFP tally of health ministry figures, at least 1,829 people have been killed inside Lebanon since then.

The war has displaced at least 1.3 million people, more than 800,000 of them inside the country, the United Nations migration agency says.

Scarred by memories of Israel's occupation of south Lebanon, a few villagers have refused to leave, fearing they might never see their hometowns again.

On October 22, UN peacekeepers evacuated two elderly sisters, the last residents of the border village of Qawzah, to the nearby Christian village of Rmeish.

Christian and Druze-majority areas have remained relatively safe, with Israel mostly targeting Shiite-majority areas where Hezbollah holds sway.

AFP contacted half a dozen mayors, from the coastal town of Naqura near the border to Qana, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) away, who said villages and towns had been emptied.

But just a few kilometres north of Qana, Abu Fadi, 80, said he is refusing to leave Tayr Debba, a village Israel has repeatedly attacked.

"Since 1978, every time there's an invasion I come back to the village," said the retired south Beirut policeman who now runs a coffee stall in the shade of an olive tree.

"I smoke my shisha and stay put. I'm not scared."

- 'No torture' -

About 5,000 people used to live in Tayr Debba near the main southern city of Tyre, but now only a handful remain, he said.

"About 10 houses in our neighbourhood alone were damaged, with most completely levelled," Fadi said.

"I have long been attached to this house and land."

But he "felt relieved" his nine children and 60 grandchildren -- who repeatedly beg him to leave -- were safe.

Bombs are not the only danger southern Lebanese face.

Israeli soldiers detained a man and a nun in two border villages before releasing them, a Lebanese security official told AFP.

Ihab Serhan, in his sixties, lived with his cat and two dogs in Kfar Kila until soldiers stormed the village and took him to Israel for questioning.

"It was a pain, but at least there was no torture," he told AFP.

He was released about 10 days later and questioned again by the Lebanese army before being freed, he said.

A strike destroyed his car, stranding him without power, water or communications as his village became a battlefield.

"I was stubborn. I didn't want to leave my home," Serhan said.

His late father dreamt of growing old in the village, but died before Israel ended its occupation of the south in 2000, and did not return.

Now the family home has been destroyed.

"I don't know what happened to my animals. Not a single house was left standing in Kfar Kila," Serhan said.