Daily Gaza: "We Waited To Be Bombed"

[Recent Scenes from Gaza - Footage from Al Jazeera]

Fighting in Gaza continued today, with Israeli troops pushing deeper in Gaza City.

To date, 971 Palestinians have been killed, including 311 children and 76 women.  On the Israeli side, four civilians and nine soldiers have died. The UN reports that two of their staff and four of their civilian contractors have been killed while on duty, with another two staff killed off-duty.

The best reports I've read from the ground have come from Jawad Harb, who works for CARE in Gaza.  Below is Harb's most recent blog post, from Tuesday:

"The leaflets came yesterday, telling us our neighbourhood would be attacked. The whole population of the area is terrified. We have nowhere to go. My neighbour checked at the UNRWA shelter but it was full. Overflowing. There is nowhere to go. We waited to be bombed.

The bombs came today. It was terrifying. We have nowhere to run. There was an air strike every five minutes. Thick black smoke 100m-150m away from us. People were scared, ran outside of their houses and gathered together in the street. 300-350 people in the street. The street was the safest place. If our house is bombed, we'll get trapped and die like the people we saw on television.

My children have seen the dead bodies of children on television. They cry, they are crying now, they are terrified. When will this end? There was screaming. It is dark and cold but most of us are still outside. My family is outside next to the house. We are terrified to go inside.

It is quiet for 20 minutes now but we don’t know if it will start again. What if it is just a short break? We can’t take the risk. My children are shivering. It is getting so cold. Some neighbours went back inside, but they are staying on the first floor, next to the door so they can run outside. We don’t know what will come next. This is the closest it has come to our house. The neighbourhood next to ours was bombed. What do we do? We don’t know. We have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go."

To read more of Harb's reports, see CARE's Notes from the Field.

Finally, to round out today's dose of Gaza misery - Save the Children estimates that the population of Gaza has received only one-eight of the food and medical supplies needed since December 27th.  According to Save the Children:

"The Israeli government said that by the morning of 12 January, it had allowed 900 aid trucks to cross into Gaza.

According to our estimates at least 7,200 trucks should have been allowed through to ensure the population had the bare minimum of food, fuel and medicine."

For the most recent Field Update from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, see here.

For the most recent UN map showing the situation in Gaza, see here. (Aid Worker Daily also has an excellent roundup of other Gaza maps.)

For a fascinating discussion of International Humanitarian Law - including violations by both Israel and Hamas - see this recent ODI post by Sorcha O'Callaghan and Sara Pavanello.