‘Everyone in Gaza is exhausted’ | First Person

Mahmoud lives in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, just kilometers away from the border with Israel. When the Israeli military issued orders last October for 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate their homes in the north of Gaza, Mahmoud refused to leave. Since then, very little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter, and communication blackouts have often made it difficult to get information about what is happening. The water supply and electricity are cut off, and

there is very little food. The day I spoke to Mahmoud, he said an eight year old child had died of malnutrition. It's a reality that's difficult to imagine, but one that's important to keep in focus as Israel's military campaign enters its 11th month. I'll let Mahmoud tell you more about what life has been like in the north of Gaza, starting with what he has to do to stay

connected to the outside world. Greetings. I'm not sure if you can hear the background noises in my voice message, but I am currently in the middle of the street, in a very busy street, buying, you know, Internet by the hour from a street vendor that has an electronic-sim working in this area where I'm currently displaced. Every day I go out to this remote location. My name is Mahmoud Shalabi. I'm a Palestinian originally from a town called Ashdod that was occupied by the Israelis in 1948.

This is where my mom and dad came from. They both witnessed Nakba when they were children, and they were forced out to live in Gaza Strip. So I am a refugee. I was born in Kuwait. You can say I had a difficult childhood, because I lived the second Gulf War as a child, and then my dad and mom moved to Yemen when the situation got hectic for Palestinians in Kuwait, and I witnessed the civil war between the South and

the North. And then we decided to move back to Palestine in 1997, and I have seen the Intifada when I was in the high school, Al Aqsa Intifada and the many incursions that have happened during my university life and afterwards, during my career, I have witnessed all the atrocities committed against

Palestinians. So that's in a nutshell, what I have been living through as a human being, and none of this is, you know, comes to amount the horror and the destruction that I have seen since the seventh of October. I am the only one left from the original Medical Aid for Palestinians team. We were 19 people before the war, and I was the only one who remained in the north of Gaza. It was my

decision. I didn't want to adhere to the occupation, because I know that my mom and dad went through the same experience when they were children. When they were kicked out of Ashdod in 1948 majority of the families, they were saying that it will be three days and we will come back. The same happened in October when they started the evacuation orders. Majority of the people who went outside, they were saying it's like three days, one week, the war will be

over, and Inshallah, we will be back to our homes. I didn't think this is going to happen, and I believed that remaining in my home would be a form of resistance. If I still exist on my spot, then I am resisting whatever hidden agendas there are to kick Palestinians out of their land or to force them to emigrate or whatever. And I would rather die in my home, rather in a tent.

So I live in the north of Gaza, in an area called Beit Lahia, which is not far away from the borders the northern borders. Every once in a while we have F-16s hovering over our heads. There is an airstrike in X Street or Y area or Z neighborhood, and we could be targeted anytime by those. How has life been in the north of Gaza? It's really difficult.

There is no water access. There is no infrastructure. There are no electricity poles in the street, no telephone poles, no lights, no electricity since like the fourth or fifth day of the war. And the sad part about it is that, like the faces of the people when you are walking, they are exhausted. I am exhausted. Everyone in Gaza is exhausted. The mental toll that we have is extreme, and I'm not sure we will recover from it in ages to come.

I was just asking about my neighbor, like I wanted to meet him for something, and they said, like he went to bury his friend who died in an airstrike. So we have all lost loved ones during the war, or some of them were injured and the others were displaced. Some of them are in the south now, some of them left the country, so we have been scattered all over the place.

And the most important aspect, I think, that the war has contributed to is taking away from us our dignity, and us Palestinians, we are dignified people, and this is a very

important word in our life. However, with the international support for the war, and you know the way that the aid has been entering, and the massacre of the flour, if you remember in March, the airdrops falling in some areas and other areas, not falling in like in the sea near the borders, it's really not a dignified way to help the people of Gaza.

Originally, I'm a computer engineer, to be honest with you, when I joined the humanitarian field, it was because I was unemployed and there was a job opportunity with CARE International. In a nutshell, that's the dream of any Palestinian in Gaza to find a job due to the, you know, high unemployment rates, and specifically among those graduates from universities. So if I talk to you about achieving myself and self esteem, ego, any

of that, I would be lying to you. I was basically looking to support my family as much as I can, and that's how I joined the humanitarian field in 2009 and then I started moving from one organisation to the other, until I settled with Medical Aid for Palestinians. Now I am the Deputy Director for programs in Gaza. I am 39 years old. I have three children and my wife, and I'm living right now with them, and also with my parents. So I'm

taking care of them. So even if I wanted to go, my parents are both above 80 years old. They are very old, and they need health care. I remember I was taking my mother for an issue that she had. I took her to Kamal Adwan hospital. I honestly remember seeing people lying on the ground waiting for someone to take care of them. No one was taking care of them because the load was humongous. I remember seeing dead bodies in the corridors, khallas. It's like this person

is dead, like, leave him there. We can't do anything right now. There weren't refrigerators working, like they couldn't put the dead bodies inside the refrigerators. I also remember at the Indonesian Hospital during the massacre that happened in Faluja, when I went to check on my friend and his family. The number of dead bodies was overwhelming. The injured people everywhere, on the pavement, outside of the hospital, because there was no space available inside the emergency room.

Elderly people were bleeding from their head and they couldn't do anything, and people just put a blanket on them and lift them. That's the only care that they could provide at that stage. Another person who had their guts outside of their belly, sorry for the graphical images, but their guts were spilled all over their body. You know what they did at one stage? They said, khallas, this person is going to die. Let's read al Fatiha, yanni, on his soul. Let's read Quran and may God

bless his soul. That's it. That's what's happening right now. Malnutrition is a ghost that is haunting everybody. Whatever amounts of food that are being brought in by organizations now is not enough. Some families, maybe once a month, would receive 30 to 40 cans of vegetables and one bag of wheat flour. So how much is this going to be sufficient for? It's not. There are also now people eating leaves from the trees, like the leaves of wild berries. We've never eaten these things before.

They have nothing. You are talking about children, specifically the young ones who need their mothers to breastfeed them. Their mothers have been malnourished. So how are they going to give milk to their children when they don't have anything? I'll give you an example. My friend works in Kamal Adwan Hospital. He's one of the pediatricians there, and he told me about a child that came in vomiting to the emergency department, and when they asked the mother, why is the baby vomiting this green

liquid? And they said, I have no milk in my breast, and I am basically giving my child herbs, you know, like chamomile tea and green tea and all those. Do you guess how old the child was? He was 10 days old. This child was 10 days old, and his mom didn't have any milk in her breasts to provide for this child. At that stage in time, there were also no milk formulas in the market. There was nothing in the market. Not even canned food was found. There were just some spices

and tomato paste and cooking oil. So if you don't have a healthy body, then your immune system is going to collapse, and with overcrowdness in places, there are piles and piles of trash. There weren't organizations working for months during the war, and garbage was just piling all over in front of internal displaced people centres, and diseases were spreading like fire. You're talking about Scabies. You're talking about Hepatitis A. You're talking about diarrhoea

for the children, many pulmonary diseases. There weren't even the simplest of medicines, and there are still no medicines available right now in Gaza. So I wanted to buy some medicine for my father, and I couldn't find it in the majority of the pharmacies that are still open, but there are also cancer patients that have not been getting their chemotherapy for nine months now. Some of them have died. One of them was my

neighbour. He wasn't able to get referred to outside of Gaza during the war to continue his chemotherapy, and he wasn't getting anything while he was still here, so he died, as simple as that. At one time because there was no food. We ate animal feed in the north of Gaza, animal feed. So can you imagine the horrors we were living in? It's going to take more than five years, maybe five to 10

years, for the health system to bounce back to what it was. And knowing that there will always be occupation looming all over our heads in Gaza Strip, then I'm afraid this is even going to take longer and longer. So once the occupation ends, then there is hope that we might be able to retrieve our dignity and provide Palestinians with the health that they need. Until then, then it's going to be a long journey of suffering.

The New Humanitarian aims to amplify the voices of refugees, asylum seekers and people affected by conflict and disasters, placing them at the center of the conversations about the policies and events that shaped their lives. Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear more stories from people affected by humanitarian issues. This episode was produced and edited by Freddie Boswell, sound engineering by Alex Higgins and Original Music by Whitney Patterson. I'm Eric Reidy. Thanks for listening.