Dorothy Wickenden
The New Yorker / October 28, 2024
As the war grinds on, logistical challenges are compounded by politics, repeated evacuations, and the fear of being killed.
In an unheated warehouse in Rafah, Ahmad Najjar ran a power cable from the battery of a banged-up company car to his laptop and sat down to work. Najjar, a thirty-eight-year-old pharmacist, is a medical-donations officer for American Near East Refugee Aid, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It was a cold day in March, and he wore a jacket and a vest as he inventoried towers of shrink-wrapped cartons of donations. There were blood-pressure cuffs, disinfectant, and medicine, but no crutches or oxygen cylinders. Trucks headed for Gaza that contain any metal are sent back at the border.
Najjar had jerry-rigged a workstation: two stacked boxes for a chair and a larger one for a desk, where he propped his laptop to set up a distribution plan. The supplies were urgently needed. After half a year of war, fewer than a dozen hospitals in Gaza remained functional, and then just barely. Nurses used dishcloths as bandages; surgeons operated by cell-phone light, steadying themselves against the booms of incoming shells.
The organization Najjar worked for, known as Anera, was founded in 1968, to provide aid to Palestinian refugees of the 1967 June War. Today, it has a permanent staff of twelve in Gaza and a hundred in the region, supplemented by volunteers and contractors as needed. Anera disperses about a hundred and fifty million dollars a year in humanitarian and development aid, from donors around the world, and oversees many of the programs that it supplies. Sean Carroll, Anera’s president and C.E.O., describes it as a “last-mile delivery partner in Gaza.”
These days, the last mile is difficult to navigate. Gaza is uniquely isolated—governed for the past seventeen years by Hamas and subject to an unremitting blockade by Israel. After thousands of Hamas soldiers and other militants surged into Israel on October 7th, killing some twelve hundred people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Israel began dropping more than seventy thousand tons of bombs, devastating an already precarious place. As aid agencies mobilized, the Israeli government prepared to obstruct them. “Humanitarian aid to Gaza?” Israel Katz, who was then the energy minister, said on social media. “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.” For two weeks, not a single aid truck entered Gaza.
During the past year, as more than forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed, the Israel Defense Forces have restricted foreign journalists’ access to Gaza to brief and highly controlled “visits.” But I have been in close contact with Najjar and some of his colleagues since the spring. Throughout the war, they have made unthinkable choices with precious few resources. With most of the Gazan health system in ruins, they established field clinics—makeshift structures of white nylon and wooden struts—and recruited displaced medical personnel to staff them. In one note, Najjar said that he and his team had saved a man’s leg from amputation by treating a suppurating wound, but had to turn away a mother whose child had haemophilia. “This is out of our hands because we don’t have the medication,” he wrote. Najjar was known for a buoyant sense of humour, but he could manage only a resigned equanimity: “We have success days and fail days.”
Before the war, Anera’s work in Gaza was focussed less on saving lives than on improving them. It funded early-childhood education programs, trained adults in software engineering, and supported entrepreneurial ventures by women. Electricity, always erratic in Gaza, was a primary concern. Without power, pumps don’t work, and sanitation fails. In heavy rains, septic tanks overflow, flooding the streets and spreading disease. Anera installed new wastewater facilities, along with wells for drinking water and solar panels to run them. Its employees on the ground, all Palestinian, scouted communities’ needs and suggested new projects to Anera’s office in Washington. When Najjar wasn’t distributing medical goods, he was developing proposals for diabetes treatment and children’s dental care.
The bombardments last October upended priorities. The IDF ordered more than a million Palestinians to evacuate the north, and refugees began pouring into Khan Younis, Najjar’s home town. At first, he recalled, he couldn’t imagine that he would be displaced: “I didn’t expect for a moment that I will experience it myself.” He had a comfortable home, shared with his wife, their five children, and his extended family.
But the bombing was getting closer. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and a principal planner of the October 7th assault, grew up in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, and Israel believed that he and his lieutenants were hiding in a labyrinthine tunnel network beneath the city. The campaign to dislodge them would clearly be devastating. The Israelis used two-thousand-pound bombs, many of them U.S.-made, which smash every structure and living creature within six hundred feet. Determined not to flee, Najjar moved his relatives from the third floor of their house to the first, then reconsidered and moved back up. He’d decided to “be killed with my family quickly, instead of dying under rubble and suffering.”
In November, Israeli jets began dropping leaflets, warning the residents of Khan Younis to evacuate. Some contained a verse from the Quran, referring to both the Biblical deluge and the attacks of October 7th, which Hamas called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: “Then the Flood overtook them, while they persisted in wrongdoing.” Najjar remained at home for another six weeks, but, as battles escalated nearby between the IDF and Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, he and his family finally left.
The IDF was sending Khan Younis residents to Rafah, in the far south, and to al-Mawasi, a newly designated safe zone to the west. Najjar and his family were ordered to al-Mawasi. A scrap of sandy Mediterranean coast with virtually no electricity, water, fuel, or food, it had become a congested encampment for hundreds of thousands of refugees. Though no bombs fell there in the early months of the war, there was little protection from the elements, and the sanitary conditions were abysmal. “When you see your children get ill several times because of unclean water, and you know the cause but you don’t have the solution,” Najjar wrote, “to see them shiver from the cold and you have nothing to do, to see the water leaking inside the tent when it rains—this made me die inside a million times.” He described the winter at al-Mawasi as “the black months in my life,” saying, “They killed our humanity.”
In al-Mawasi, as in the rest of Gaza, life revolved around securing the necessities for survival. Even after Israel began allowing some aid to enter, the trucks had to wait for days at the border; witnesses at the Rafah crossing observed lines backed up for miles. Once inside, convoys were sometimes beset by desperate crowds and armed gangs. The transit of aid is overseen by an Israeli agency called COGAT, for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. Amid the shortages, COGAT became a target of outrage among Palestinians and aid workers, likened by one security expert to a prison gatekeeper.
One of Najjar’s colleagues, a program manager named Suad Lubbad, served as an unofficial shelter coordinator for Anera workers in al-Mawasi. Lubbad, fifty-five, is an even-keeled woman with a Ph.D. in human development and a warm, brisk manner. Since June, she has been running a series of mother-and-child clinics, which Anera established with support from UNICEF. Between shifts, she arranges cleaning details and organizes women to bake bread.
Before the war, Lubbad led an Anera program that worked with farmers and women’s cooperatives to provide breakfast—fruit, milk, cheese, and spinach pies—to schoolchildren. Learning materials were scarce, so she showed students how to use Styrofoam food containers to grow seeds, and how to recycle the foil wrapping inside for drawing paper.
As the first bombs fell, Lubbad—a single mother since her husband died, eight years ago—fled Gaza City with her three grown children. Until I asked, she didn’t mention that she’d left family behind; an air strike had killed fourteen of her relatives, including her sister and her sister’s children. Like some ninety per cent of her fellow-Gazans, she was now an internally displaced person.
In a video tour, Lubbad walks through Anera’s corner of al-Mawasi: sandy alleyways, white tents, a few plastic stools, clotheslines sagging under the day’s wash. A diminutive woman in a beige head scarf, she squints at the camera and says, “The good thing here is that we are having olive trees around us.” At times, she described displacement to me as an educational experience: “We have people who had no idea how to light a fire who now do this every night.” But in candid moments she conceded that life in a tent camp was gruelling. “We sleep on the floor,” she said in June. “I have backaches. We see many kinds of insects. It’s very, very hot, and the sunshine is everywhere. We don’t have gas to cook our food.” The obstacles of the war made her job nearly impossible. “You want to sleep to get rid of the whole exhausting day,” she said. “Then you wake up another day to go to work.”
Lubbad opened mobile clinics where they were needed most, setting up in tents or unoccupied buildings. Her patients seemed almost as if they were being attacked by the camp itself. They suffered from skin ailments caused by contaminated sand, or by scabies, bedbugs, and lice. Rat bites were a hazard, as were infections from bathing in seawater polluted by garbage and human waste. Hepatitis and dysentery afflicted people already stricken with grief. One fourteen-year-old boy told Lubbad, “I’m sad that my father has been martyred and I couldn’t say goodbye to him. And I’m sad because even our house that has so many memories with Dad has exploded.”
Traumas were compounded by the lack of basic commodities. It was common for women to go a week without bathing because they had no soap. Others, lacking shampoo, cut off their hair. A colleague of Lubbad’s told me, “They’ve lost what it feels like to be a woman. They feel like their identity has been taken away.” Lubbad issued “dignity kits,” containing a hairbrush, a toothbrush, undergarments, sanitary pads, and light head coverings.
The most pressing problem was hunger. When nonprofits were able to get food trucks across the border, they began a fraught process of triage, distributing such staples as beans and lentils, and occasionally meat, to wherever there were passable roads and the need was most urgent. For people without cooking facilities, Anera set up community kitchens, where cooks tended stockpots that produced meals for hundreds of families. It was not remotely enough.
Lubbad spoke about the pressures on pregnant women, hearing the battles at night “and not knowing how to reach the hospital, not having enough food for this baby.” Women were depressed, she told me: “They are facing a lot of troubles to make life easier for their families,” going out each day to search for food and firewood, and cooking whatever they secured. Their husbands apparently weren’t much help. “You know, women can do many things,” she said. “Men, I don’t know, they aren’t able to do so many things at the same time.”
As hunger deepened, the U.N. regularly reported that Israel curtailed truck deliveries into the territory, and the International Criminal Court alleged that Benjamin Netanyahu and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, were using the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” Brigadier General Elad Goren, who directs COGAT’s efforts in Gaza, brusquely dismissed the charges, insisting that the real problem was the U.N.’s inefficiencies. Though he acknowledged some challenges—“Food insecurity, maybe. Difficulties in access and movement, maybe”—he claimed, “There is no famine in Gaza, period. We check how many calories are entering every day per person. We are not limiting the number of trucks. We are facilitating.”
Stories in the American press have refuted that claim, and more directly implicated the Biden Administration in the crisis. In April, after U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department’s refugees bureau presented clear evidence that Israel had purposefully held back food and medicine from Gaza, President Biden chose to go ahead with weapons shipments. Lubbad evaded the debate, relating only what she saw in her clinics. This summer, she said, “moderate acute malnutrition” was more common than life-threatening “severe acute malnutrition.” For the less dire cases, at least, she had the necessary nutritional supplements—“So far, so good.” But it was worse in the north, which was virtually inaccessible to aid convoys for months. Oxfam reported that people there were subsisting on the equivalent of less than a can of beans per day, and that ninety-five per cent of the territory had no access to clean water.
After Israeli intelligence found continued Hamas activity in Gaza City, the IDF resumed a concerted initiative, effectively blockading the north. Sami Matar, who leads many of Anera’s deliveries, described harrowing journeys there over the summer. On one, IDF soldiers fired a machine gun at his car, damaging the tires and the gas tank. On another, a drone lowered to eye level, and a disembodied voice ordered him to get out and unpack bags of clothes and hygiene products for inspection: “Open the green bag. Open the yellow bag.” In August, he managed to deliver twelve hundred parcels of produce to Gaza City. Upon returning, he reported extreme shortages of milk, vegetables, meat, and medicine. Scarcity led to preposterous prices: tomatoes cost ninety-six dollars a pound. His boss told him that he was being reckless; he had a family to care for. He told her, “If I die, I’m going to die doing my job.”
Under international law, nations at war are obligated to protect humanitarian personnel. In Gaza, aid groups rely on COGAT to facilitate the practice of “deconfliction”—rules meant to reduce the risk that workers are mistaken for militants or inadvertently enter combat zones. Before missions, Anera supplies the names and nationalities of the workers involved, the cars’ makes and contents, and the convoys’ routes. COGAT is expected to convey the information to fighting units, but IDF and intelligence officers can overrule its plans and directives.
Carroll, Anera’s C.E.O., said that the decision of whether to fully cooperate with COGAT was tricky: “Should you be more or less visible?” Humanitarian workers don’t carry weapons, and they worry about attracting attention from the IDF and from militants, who are known to hijack trucks. Some organizations reportedly avoid trouble by paying Hamas, or by handing over a portion of the cargo. (Carroll said emphatically that Anera has no contact with Hamas or any belligerent.)
Goren maintained that the deconfliction process operated smoothly. “We are working shoulder to shoulder,” he said. “When an ambulance needs to move, when a U.N. team needs to bring medical supplies, when a pipeline needs to be fixed, it’s coordinated perfectly, with not an incident.” He conceded, though, that at times “complications arise.” Observers enumerate such complications as blocked roadways, looting, Hamas activities, and misdirected IDF targeting orders.
The relationship between COGAT and aid groups was more strained than Goren admitted. Israel has complained for decades that UNRWA, the United Nations agency that provides the majority of Gaza’s health care, education, and social services, is a hostile presence. In January, the Israeli government named a hundred and ninety UNRWA staff members as “hardened fighters”—nineteen of whom it accused of taking part in the October 7th attack. Eighteen countries immediately suspended more than four hundred and thirty million dollars in funding. An independent investigation acknowledged that UNRWA facilities could have been used to store weapons, but concluded that Israel had provided no persuasive evidence that significant numbers of staffers were terrorists. The donations resumed (except for the U.S. portion, frozen until March). The U.N.’s internal inquiry cleared ten employees and fired nine others, while saying that Israel had not sufficiently verified evidence against them—a waffling response that enabled UNRWA to continue its work.
Carroll objected to what he sees as a reflexive Israeli assumption: “ ‘All Palestinians are terrorists.’ Really? ‘Every humanitarian worker is a sympathizer’?” Although Anera has never been accused of employing militants, it has its own problems with COGAT. “Let me count the ways,” Carroll said. “Machinations. Arbitrary changes in rules, down to nail clippers removed at a checkpoint and the truck turned back. In May, we started preparing shipments of frozen meat for the Eid al-Adha festival in June. The first was delivered in September. Tons of meat are still stuck in Jordan and Egypt.”
On the afternoon of March 8th, Najjar was working at the distribution center in Rafah when he got a visit from Anera’s logistics coordinator, Mousa Shawwa. The two had business to transact—Shawwa was picking up supplies for mobile clinics—but there was also gossip to catch up on, and Shawwa wanted to ask Najjar about treating his mother’s hypertension. Shawwa was known as a consummate fixer. When Anera officers were told that they’d have to wait a week for a permit to enter Gaza, he secured it in a day. When his boss asked if jackets could be made with the Anera logo, a tailor he knew rushed to fill the order. Najjar, who’d worked with Shawwa for thirteen years, described him as “Anera Superman.”
After packing up his supplies, Shawwa returned to the apartment in central Gaza where he and his family were staying. As he chatted with his wife, Dua, and her brother, an Israeli missile crashed into the building. Dua later told Human Rights Watch, “I lost consciousness immediately and only woke up later in the hospital to find out that I had lost Mousa and my brother.” She was treated for a fractured hand and for a head wound. Dima, their thirteen-year-old daughter, had cuts all over and a broken foot. Karim, their six-year-old son, had a brain bleed. He died on March 19th.
When Najjar got the news, “I was not able to speak for a day,” he told me. “My children knew from my expression that something horrible had happened. They became crazy about my safety. They were sure that they might hear about my death anytime.” It was the first time in Anera’s history that an employee had been killed by the Israeli military. Carroll got a call from a COGAT official, who offered condolences but no explanation. “I want to believe that it was a mistake,” Carroll told me. “But, wait a minute—are we being targeted? How could anyone in their right mind not come up with the same question?”
This spring, reports from The Times and Human Rights Watch looked into eight bombings of sites and vehicles occupied by aid groups and found that in every instance their location had been provided to COGAT. In Shawwa’s case, Carroll had e-mailed in coordinates and photographs of the building where he was living, and reconfirmed the information four days before he was killed.
Goren said that the strike on Shawwa was “an incident we haven’t been able to look into.” In fact, the IDF had told the Times months earlier that its target was a Hamas terrorist who had participated in the October 7th incursion, and that an investigation was expected. But Shawwa was not a terrorist, and the bombing had the marks of a precision strike: it demolished only his floor, leaving the one below standing.
Najjar told me that he used to dream about his children’s future, “thinking about the colleges they would attend.” Now he worried about whether they could resume their studies at all. All twelve of Gaza’s universities, and some eighty-five per cent of its primary and secondary schools, have been irrevocably damaged. Others are being used to house displaced families. The IDF justifies such attacks by saying that militants shelter in schools, making them legitimate targets. Najjar said that the schools “will take years to rebuild; homes will need tens of years.” In the meantime, he added, “the killing machine continues to kill our people.”
By October, more than three hundred humanitarian workers had died. Aid groups speculate that one reason for the high death toll is the IDF’s increased reliance on artificial intelligence. In April, the left-wing Israeli magazine +972 published an investigation about A.I.-powered targeting systems that operate with breathtaking speed and reach. In the first weeks of the war, one tool, called Lavender, reportedly populated a “kill list” with tens of thousands of suspected militants. Another, Where’s Daddy?, tracked the suspects and signalled the Army when they were at home. (The IDF has denied the existence of a kill list, and described Lavender as a database that simply collates intelligence sources.) In some cases, the information has been catastrophically wrong; three intelligence sources said they had learned after the bombing of a family home that the target wasn’t there. Carroll said, “You combine the A.I. systems with the expansion of the acceptable level of damage and you get many innocents killed.”
Miri Eisin, a retired IDF colonel and a fellow at Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, told me it was wrong to conclude that a machine was making the decisions: “Nothing, zero, is done without a human being.” In fact, Eisin suggested, human fallibility was the problem. The IDF “doesn’t always have the right person at the right time,” she said. “Some are too fast on the trigger.”
The IDF boasts of being “the most moral army in the world.” Yehuda Shaul, who served in the occupied territories between 2001 and 2004, has spent much of his career gathering evidence of how far the military has deviated from this standard. After completing his service, Shaul and some Army friends founded a nonprofit, Breaking the Silence, to compile testimonies from similarly disillusioned soldiers.
Shaul said that the “incrimination process” for assassinating enemy commanders was once long and arduous. According to his sources in military intelligence, “you needed a file this thick, and then a committee of officers made the decisions.” There were added restrictions for strikes on such targets as schools and hospitals. For apartment buildings, the IDF engaged in “roof-knocking,” dropping a small rocket as a warning that a missile was going to hit. Over the years, the rules loosened, and the number of deaths seen as tenable rose drastically. Today, Shaul contended, “rules of engagement don’t exist for ground troops.” Over all, “there is deliberate disproportion—‘You hit my nose, I run over you with a tank.’ ”
Colonel Grisha Yakubovich, a former head of COGAT’s Civil Department, rejected that argument, and emphasized that what happened on October 7th was unlike earlier rounds of escalation: “Three thousand terrorists invaded our towns, moshavim, and kibbutzim, burned families, raped our daughters, slaughtered elders.” The IDF argues that Hamas invites civilian deaths by hiding among them. “If they sacrifice their people to save their own skin, that’s their historical failure,” Yakubovich said. “In a war, you stop being polite.” Still, he added, Israel was obliged to improve coordination before issuing orders to strike: “We’re judged by higher values. We don’t want to be compared to Hamas.”
Dave Harden, an expert in crisis management in the Middle East, noted that “Israel, as the occupying power, is legally responsible for the safety of the general population.” When questioned about excessive collateral damage, IDF spokespeople issue slight variations on the statement “We make efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible.” To warn residents to evacuate areas that are about to be attacked, the IDF, in addition to dropping leaflets, sometimes sends S.M.S. messages or makes phone calls. In many strikes on aid workers, there were no such warnings.
For years, Carroll talked with José Andrés about forming a partnership on the ground in Gaza. Andrés, a burly, charismatic Spanish American chef who owns dozens of upscale restaurants, founded World Central Kitchen in 2010 to supply aid in natural-disaster zones. His motto is “Food is a universal human right.”
Andrés—friendly with world leaders, television personalities, and the mega-rich—presents himself as a kind of humanitarian action figure, filmed at the scenes of earthquakes and floods, stirring cauldrons with paddles or wading through high water to deliver food to stranded families. An essential premise of World Central Kitchen is that disaster relief should be run like a restaurant kitchen: intense, efficient, improvisational, and attuned to local products.
World Central Kitchen arrived in Israel on October 8th, to feed families that had lost their homes in the attacks. After the counter-strikes began, Anera helped W.C.K. obtain permission to enter Gaza, and the two groups began opening community kitchens together. Carroll knew that Andrés, who has more than a million followers on Instagram, would bring attention to the cause. “José Andrés in Gaza—with his charm, visibility, and connections—that was a big deal,” he said.
On the night of April 1st, seven employees of World Central Kitchen finished unloading a hundred tons of food supplies in central Gaza, then headed south to their quarters, in Rafah. It was late, but they were travelling on an approved route, in three white cars, two of which had W.C.K.’s logo, a bubbling pot, stamped on their roofs. Around 11 P.M., a targeted drone missile hit the first vehicle; soon afterward, the second was struck, and then the third. Gruesome footage showed the burned chassis of the cars, bloodied passports, the remains of bodies in bulletproof vests.
Air strikes on aid workers, a regular occurrence since November, were suddenly the source of international outrage. Andrés accused the IDF of targeting the convoy “systematically, car by car.” Christopher Lockyear—the secretary-general of Médecins Sans Frontières, which had seen five staffers killed—excoriated a “pattern of deliberate attacks on humanitarians, health workers, journalists, U.N. personnel, schools and homes.” The Israeli government’s response was perfunctory. Netanyahu, stone-faced in a video statement, called the attack “a tragic event in which our forces unintentionally harmed noncombatants,” adding, “This happens in war.” An IDF statement described it as “a grave mistake.”
On April 4th, President Biden called Netanyahu to demand that he act immediately to reduce harm to civilians and aid workers. Netanyahu, a longtime practitioner of political sleight of hand, promised a thorough inquiry and said that the military would “do everything to prevent a recurrence.” The next day, the IDF issued the initial results of its investigation. Two officers were fired and three reprimanded, though the report maintained that the officials who had approved the attacks “were convinced they were targeting armed Hamas operatives.”
Anera, like other organizations, suspended operations in Gaza, but it went back to work the following week, after COGAT assured Carroll that his workers would not be at risk. World Central Kitchen returned a month later, although Andrés wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that “little has changed.” On August 7th, another W.C.K. staffer, a Palestinian warehouse worker in central Gaza, was killed in an air strike. The death received only passing mention in the press.
In April, after the IDF declared its mission in Khan Younis complete, Najjar and his family went home. The city was a wasteland. They passed bulldozed mountains of exploded concrete, skeletal remains of high-rises, and people wearily loading donkey carts with filthy mattresses, clothing, toys, and broken beams for firewood. One woman, despairing over the wreckage of her home, told a reporter for NPR, “There’s no Khan Younis. God damn Sinwar.”
Najjar refused to speak about Hamas or Israel: “I don’t like to talk about politics. I believe that always civilians are the victims.” Though his home was badly damaged, his family moved back in, and he resumed work at the wound clinic. Before long, the city was showing scattered signs of renewal: venders selling falafel, a barber cutting hair amid blown-out shop windows, tailors at sewing machines salvaged from a destroyed factory. Then, in July, the IDF returned to Khan Younis, having determined that Hamas was regrouping there.
For a month, Najjar sent only a few cryptic messages, and when he resurfaced he wrote, “We spent very painful and scary weeks recently.” During one operation, an Israeli bomb struck fifty yards from his clinic, killing seventeen people and injuring twenty-six. Najjar and his team administered first aid, laying out the wounded on tarps in the sand. Ambulances took victims in critical condition to the overflowing wards at Nasser Hospital.
The IDF reported striking more than fifty infrastructure sites in its offensive: a weapons depot, tunnel shafts, buildings occupied by Hamas. As it proceeded, Najjar wrote to me, “The Israeli tanks are not far from my home, and the situation is very dangerous.” He included a photo of a suitcase and several backpacks (two small pink ones for the girls), all ready to leave. When I asked where he would go if they had to evacuate again, he replied, “I swear to God, I don’t know. I’m just thinking of rescuing my family.”
Gazans knew from experience that “safe zones” offered no real protection. The military had recently tracked two top Hamas commanders to a fenced compound in al-Mawasi. On July 13th, F-35 jets dropped eight tons of bombs there. The IDF described the strike as the result of a careful vetting process that went all the way up to the Prime Minister. The Gaza Ministry of Health reported ninety civilians killed and three hundred wounded.
Suad Lubbad went out to assess the damage and started to cry. “I couldn’t see what happened to the children and to the people,” she told me. For the first time, she sounded desperate. “People sometimes get a warning just half an hour before, and leave everything behind, and just go around in the street. There are no other places left for them to go.” Her voice rising, she added, “We reached a limit. We are not able to continue in such a situation.” Two young boys her team was treating, one of them deaf, had been killed in another air strike. “We were trying to get them out of their psychological distress,” she said, “but we could not keep them alive.”
In July, COGAT established the Joint Coordination Board, focussed on “the safety and effectiveness of humanitarian operations.” The next month, a World Food Programme truck was shot up as it approached an Israeli security post. “The current deconfliction system is failing,” Cindy McCain, the agency’s executive director, said. Two days later, Anera was delivering supplies to a hospital in Rafah when an air strike hit the lead car, killing four men inside. The IDF and Anera have offered conflicting reports about the dead men, describing them variously as “armed assailants” and as hard-up locals who had joined the convoy as escorts. Sami Matar, who’d been in the second car, was unhurt; he completed the delivery, leaving the dead behind.
On September 1st, Najjar wrote that, since he’d sent the photo of his family’s backpacks, they had evacuated back to al-Mawasi several times. They wouldn’t do it again: “We prefer that they kill us one time instead of killing us hundreds of times via their evacuation orders.” But he had some good news about work. He had recently hired a paediatric surgeon to perform circumcisions. “We’ve done the circumcision for 91 newborn boys so far,” Najjar wrote, “and tomorrow, we are going to do another 20.” He was in the process of hiring some ten additional doctors, to handle everything from respiratory infections to general surgery.
Lubbad, too, found reasons for optimism. The first confirmed case of polio in Gaza had got everyone’s attention, and Israel had agreed to a series of pauses in hostilities; COGAT facilitated vaccine deliveries, and aid workers spread out to administer the drops. Lubbad’s clinic directed patients to sites where the vaccines were being given. “Most children are reaching out for vaccination,” she said. “It is present everywhere and easy to get.”
The wider picture was bleak. In mid-October, with winter setting in, a State Department spokesman said that the amount of aid reaching Gazans had dropped to its lowest levels in a year. According to Save the Children, Gaza had the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world. Lubbad reported ever-dwindling supplies, adding, “Many don’t have winter clothes, and people are worried about their shelters.” Heavy winds and flooding had already begun, destroying dozens of families’ tents.
On October 17th, the IDF announced a major development: Israeli soldiers had finally killed Yahya Sinwar. Lubbad was sceptical that it would make a difference—Israel had killed many Hamas leaders in the past year, and the war hadn’t stopped. Still, she clung to the idea that her family would one day resume a semblance of their former life. “Imagine—by car, I could be in Gaza City in less than an hour,” she said. “We hope that we may go home soon, if we still have a home.” ♦
Dorothy Wickenden is a staff writer at The New Yorker; her latest book is The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights
