Daily Gaza, Part 2: 90,000 People Displaced

As if the previous post wasn't depressing enough - the UN estimates that as many as 90,000 people in Gaza have fled their homes since the conflict began, including 30,000 huddled in UN schools and 60,000 who are seeking shelter with relatives.

A recent New York Times article provides a sense of what it's like on the ground:

"When Israeli soldiers moved deeper into the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza on Sunday night, Olfat Jaawanah decided she had had enough. Shrapnel flew through a window, injuring her son, Ali, she said, and on Monday morning, she gathered a few blankets and moved her nine children out of their large house.

The nearby United Nations school was full — its bare classrooms packed with families and its toilets smelling foul — so she took her family instead to her husband’s office, in a building belonging to an international organization in the center of Gaza City.

...

Movement is complicated by the confusion over when it is safe to leave. When the Abu Hajaj family received a leaflet last weekend, they took it as a sign of safe passage. But Majad Abdel Karim Abu Hajaj, a teacher at a United Nations school, said his mother and sister were killed as they walked holding a white flag. Their bodies remain where they fell, he said, because ambulances cannot get to the area."

According to an article yesterday by McClatchy:

"In the 17 days since Israel began pummeling Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed al Sultan's family has moved four times, from house to house, shelter to shelter, having left all their possessions behind. Now they're among hundreds of displaced Palestinians who are sleeping in cold concrete classrooms in a schoolhouse that's serving as a temporary shelter in Gaza City."

Similarly, from an AP article yesterday:

"In Khaled al-Dali's two-room shack in the Shati refugee camp, 21 people — half of them relatives who fled the fighting — take turns sleeping because there aren't enough mattresses to go around. Without fuel, the family cooks on fires made from trash. He has sold most of his furniture to buy food.

...

During the short daylight hours, shoppers crowd the few open stores and outdoor markets in a hunt for scarce goods, from diapers to dairy. At dusk, streets quickly become deserted as civilians retreat indoors, for fear of being mistaken for militants by Israel's military."

[Palestinians fleeing their homes - Photo from Reuters]