‘There is a smell of death’: Aid workers in Gaza trying to work and stay alive
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An injured child being rushed into Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, following an Israeli air strike on Oct 25, 2023.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
LONDON - Mr Hussam Okal, an aid worker in a United Nations-operated shelter, is trying to help 22,000 people forced to stay there while in the same desperate position himself.
Israel has ordered more than one million Palestinians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip in anticipation of a ground invasion, and the humanitarian situation has become increasingly dire, with the last remaining supplies of fuel, water and medicines running out and organisations forced to make do.
Thousands of aid workers like Mr Okal are sticking with their jobs – with little sleep and limited resources – all while trying to stay alive.
“We are trying to secure our families and make them feel safe,” said Mr Okal, who works for the UN Relief and Works Agency, an organisation that aids Palestinians, and who is staying at the same college-turned-shelter in the southern city of Khan Younis where he works. “But on the other hand, we are trying to serve the displaced people.”
As air strikes scream overhead, “we are working in terrifying conditions”, Mr Okal said. As at Friday, 53 UN staff members were killed by Israeli air strikes, according to the agency, with many of them killed at home or while on duty. All of them were Palestinian.
But the biggest challenge of his job is the scarcity, he said: scarcity of resources to feed the people who have fled there. Scarcity of time to take care of his own family while he is looking after strangers. Scarcity of security, as Israel pummels the enclave.
“We suffer from the shortages of everything,” Mr Okal, 51, said in a voice message.
Dr Husam, a medical doctor in Gaza City, has not left his hometown despite Israel’s calls for evacuation. He has continued to deliver what limited supplies of medicines he can secure across the city, amid Israeli air strikes and increasing fatigue.
“We can’t eat, we can’t sleep,” Dr Husam, 40, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is concerned about his safety, said in a voice message.
Relief workers awaiting the arrival of the first trucks carrying humanitarian aid at a warehouse facility in Gaza.
At his family home, his mother, who is diabetic, is struggling to get the medication she needs. It is extremely difficult, he said, to tend to patients at the same time he is taking care of his family, including his six-month-old son.
He has seen a lot over the decades he has spent working for aid organisations across the Gaza Strip. But, he said, his most recent visit to the Al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest medical complex, left him short of words. The wounded are crammed into corridors, which are already filled with people who have fled their homes and are seeking refuge from air strikes.
“I can’t describe what we witnessed there,” he said. “There is a smell of death in front of the emergency department.
“They have a tent where they are putting dead people (in), most of them children. Inside the emergency department, people are lying on the floor,” he said.
Personnel from the Palestine Red Crescent Society unloading a truck carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza Strip after it enters from Egypt in Rafah, on Oct 21, 2023.
The vast majority of those on the ground are Palestinians, but there are foreign nationals, too, who have stayed to help. Seven miles south of Khan Younis, near the border with Egypt, a relief agency team has been tasked with the difficult job of assessing civilian casualties and damages to UN premises.
“We are working 18 to 20 hours a day,” said Mr Hector Sharp, the agency’s head of field legal office. “We sleep whenever we can. We eat when we can. We try to have at least one meal a day.”
Unlike Palestinian aid workers who did not have a choice, Mr Sharp, a New Zealand national who has been working in Gaza for the past three years, made the decision to stay. He is sleeping not in a shelter, but in an office that he shares with his colleagues.
The job of his team, Mr Sharp said, was to visit sites hit by air strikes inside the enclave and to advise on possible violations of international law. But it is a very complicated thing to do “in a situation where the international humanitarian standards are not being given enough consideration”, Mr Sharp said.
Palestinian children at one of the few water stations still functioning in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct 24, 2023.
In the places they visit, there are thousands of people who have not received enough water, bread or medicine for days.
“They are expecting us to bring something, because we are UN representatives,” he said. “But we are there to see if all sides respect international law.
“And people can’t eat law,” he said. “They can’t drink law.” NYTIMES