Journalists enter battered Gaza Strip from Israel on Friday - but aid workers still kept out
Marian Houk
January 25, 2009
Foreign journalists entered Gaza for the first time in many weeks without restrictions -- at least, there were no restrictions either on their numbers, or where they go inside Gaza.
The international press core based in Israel had fought for this right for months. They wrote to the authorities. They petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court. They appealed the Government's maneuvers to keep the press out of Gaza. They asked questions about the ban in press conferences from Sderot to Washington. They wrote about it. And, when the borders were open, many were there.
The Israeli military's Operation Cast Iron began with air strikes and naval shelling on 27 December, and a ground operation began on 3 January. First Israel and then Hamas each stated that they would observe unilateral cease-fires that began last Sunday.
We had been asked by the IDF to bring waivers saying that we would not hold Israel's Ministry of Defense or the Israeli army responsible for anything that happens to us. (Some of these waivers were collected, but some were not ... )
"When will you be coming back to Israel?", asked the young woman in khaki uniform sitting in the passport control booth at Erez crossing -- as if what is on the other side is, really, another country. (A European diplomat say that it is not legal for Israel to treat Gaza as another country, or to stamp passports with exit and re-entry visas. An Israeli lawyer in Tel Aviv advised a few months ago that Erez Terminal is not on the official Israeli list of its international border crossings).
Nevertheless, each passage through passport control into Gaza is treated with more deliberation than for someone leaving Israel through Ben Gurion international airport.
Perhaps this is why the stamp in the passport has changed from the one used a year ago. Now, the exit visa says, simply "Erez Terminal" (as opposed, say, to "Allenby Border Control", or "Ben Gurion Border Control"). In fact, it is really a grey area, where Israel keeps unilaterally changing the rules, mainly to reinforce its own argument that it does not still occupy Gaza.
The re-entry visa, stamped hours later, does not say anything in English, and does not indicate any time duration -- but it says "Erez Terminal" in Hebrew.
Because journalists are one of the few categories of people allowed to enter Gaza, the re-entry stamp has a notation added by hand at the passport control both, which reads "B/1" - which essentially indicates that it is a tourist visa with a working permit for foreign journalists who are not paid by an Israeli entity.
A normal tourist visa is a "B/2".
A year ago, a reentry permit from Gaza read "Erez Terminal Border Control" - and "Visit Permit B/2 - valid for 3 months".
Inside Gaza ... the Hamas border control, further inside the Gaza Strip than the Palestinian Coordination Office, inspected out passports and equipment, then waved us though.
The McClatchy Newspaper group's Jerusalem bureau chief Dion Nissenbaum wrote about trying -- and eventually succeeding -- to get into Gaza via Egypt and the Rafah crossing a few days earlier. Nissenbaum wrote that he got a Hamas-issued stamp inside his passport when he entered the Gaza Strip through Rafah a few days ago. He wrote: "Then, when all hope seemed to be lost, the gates opened and the reporters stumbled over each other to get inside. Screaming matches broke out inside the terminal and the Egyptian authorities threatened to shut the whole process down if reporters didnīt calm down. After signing yet another piece of paper vowing to leave Gaza within a certain number of days, we were all allowed to cross into Gaza. Waiting for us on the other side were the Hamas border guards in their black uniforms and beards. One of those standing watch was Ramzi, a 27-year-old border guard who pointed out the ceiling tiles knocked out of place by the Israeli bombing. Ramzi said he wasnīt Hamas, but he stood by the Hamas leaders who were democratically elected to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Though Hamas had seized military control of Gaza in 2007, Ramzi thought the U.S. and Israel had pushed Hamas into a corner ... While we waited in the terminal, the Gaza border guards stamped our passports with a specially-designed Palestinian Authority entry stamp — the first such stamp Iīve ever received for crossing into Gaza"...
Nissenbaum wrote that "From the start, it was clear that Israel had no intention of allowing journalists into Gaza to see what their military was doing ... Eventually, enterprising journalists figured out how to navigate the Egyptian bureaucracy and get into Gaza. For American reporters, it meant going to the U.S. embassy and signing an affidavit that basically cleared the U.S. of any responsibility for you in Gaza and getting a letter from the Egyptian press office ... Normally, getting to Gaza is a 50-minute drive from Jerusalem to Israelīs Erez terminal, followed by a brief stop at Israeli passport control, a walk through the high-security Israeli terminal and into the demolished Palestinian side. From there itīs a 20-minute drive to Gaza City. This time, it took 48 hours to get into Gaza"... Dion's posting can be read in full here.
The young woman reporter from Gaza who met us after we had crossed through Erez, and accompanied us through the day, said that her family survived the three-week Israeli onslaught, but their house was bombed and destroyed. They received a warning via a phone call to evacuate their house within ten minutes -- an attack was imminent. They were not told where it would be safe to go, or where not. They went to stay with relatives, and they've survived -- but, their home has been destroyed.
Houses and factories in one area we saw were completely demolished. In another area, a hospital (Al-Wafd) was clearly targetted, and had a large hole in the exact center of its facade, with marks of other firing all over. The carcasses of three cows were rotting along the side of the road. Inside Gaza City, it was one house flattened here, one mosque crushed there.
One man whose home is a pile of rubble showed us where he was sleeping, in an area created in another pile of rubble across the street from his former home, where he has created a tent out of blue-and-white striped plastic sheeting, and where he has placed a thin mattress on a concrete slab floor. He told us he had sent his two sons to live with relatives in Deir al-Balah, while he was staying by his former home. "We have nothing now. I will wait here for help from the United Nations".
The owners of two small factories destroyed not far away, and some of their employees, were huddled on a small hill of rubble of a former enterprise, sitting in a circle around a small camp-fire they had made of broken concrete blocks. With flames produced from burning pieces of broken trees for fuel, they were preparing tea. They had begun to pick up pieces of material that could be salvaged, which were piled up nearby. "Some of us are here around the clock to guard what remains", they said, "otherwise we would have nothing left". They said they had seen no government officials, and that they, too, were waiting for someone to come to offer help.
Several U.S. media reports indicate that Hamas was paying for dates and coffee served in mourning tents for those who died in the Israeli military offensive that was said to have as its aim the creation of an improved security situation for Israelis in the south of the country. On Friday, there were reports that Hamas officals began distributing $500 - in crisp $100 bills - as an initial emergency grant to families whose homes had been destroyed, with more financial aid (apparently also to be denominated in dollars) to come on Sunday.
The journalists who entered from Israel carried with them Israeli shekels to pay for transportation and interpretation assistance, as well as for, food and lodging during their time inside the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government -- with, possibly, the assent of the Palestinian Authority, but this is a very murky area -- has been refusing to ship Israeli shekels inside Gaza since the military withdrawal, on the grounds that it does not want to help Hamas. The European Community, however, has been pushing for the currency shipment, to pay the salaries of the loyal Palestinian Authority employees, as well as social assistance such as pensions and welfare benefits, and for various other bills. Without that cash infusion, people do not have funds to buy anything, the Europeans stress. There are reports that Hamas wants to switch to using the U.S. dollar ...
All the people we spoke to said they were neither Hamas nor Fatah, but they wanted the emnity between the two largest Palestinian organizations ended, and unity restored. They all also said they wanted the Israelis to realize that not all Palestinians were their enemies -- they said they wanted to go back to "living together" - as it was "twenty years before".
There were green flags (Hamas) on many buildings. There were Palestinian four-color flags (white, black, green and red) flying alone, and Palestinian flags with Hamas green flags placed just above. There were yellow Fatah flags. And there were the red flags of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). There were not, in the areas we visited, any black flags of mourning -- at least, not yet.
And, there was the occasional graffiti sign on a wall, most often the word "Hamas".
As-Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza City, was quieter than before the cease-fire. "Since the cease-fire, the situation is almost normal", one doctor said ... A Danish nurse who came to Gaza for a week with the ICRC said that after the two unilateral cease-fires kicked in on Sunday, also said that the situation became almost normal. But before that, he said, there was daily mayhem.
The head of orthopedic surgery (when bones are involved, rather than just the abdomen or chest cavity, for example), Dr. Subhi Skeik, said that the first day of the attack, on 27 December, was just madness, with over 200 people brought to Shifa Hospital, many needing surgery. "We have six operating rooms", he said, "and each one is normally used for just one patient at the time. That day, we had two to three patients in each operating room, and we were also operating in the corridors, in the intensive care units, and other places that were not so good ..." his voice trailed off. "Definitely we lost lives due to the lack of capacity", Dr. Skeik said.
Dr. Skeik said that "the types of injuries we say, and the way patients were killed, showed us different injuries than we have seen before, and different weapons. A big number were exposed definitely to unusual types of weapons. There were plenty of cases where we saw minute injuries to the abdomen and chest, but inside there was massive destruction of internal organs. The pinpointed inlets cannot explain the amount of internal damage. And there were no exit wounds. Then we saw metallic objects in the abdomen. We did not remove all of them (he indicated that this was because they had to move to repair the major damage in a series of urgent cases), if they are not causing apparent blood loss. But after the surgery, when the patient should have been more or less stable, they then dramatically died. We cannot explain this way of dying -- neither us, nor the doctors from various countries who were with us. We wonder if these foreign bodies, these metallic objects, are killing the patients. Another type of wounds involved bilateral amputations (an arm and a leg, for example), or both lower limbs destroyed totally, as if cut by a knife -- and the tissues were cauterized. These patients, too, suddenly died in recovery".
In a flash of emotion, he said "we needed help during this aggression or massacre. But it came late".
A Jerusalem-based Italian journalist who has been in Gaza for about a week has been writing that the death figure (about 1,300) is too high, and has been deliberately inflated for propaganda purposes. He wrote that the true figure is only about 500, and that "the Palestinian journalists know the truth". One reason he knows this, the Italian journalist wrote, is that the hospitals are no longer full.
We asked Dr. Skeik about this. He said that "in the first three weeks, this hospital (Shifa Hospital), received so many patients that we did a triage, and gave initial treatment before evacuating the patients to local hospitals to make room for more incoming casualties. We did this two to three times a day. We were using beds in different hospitals. Then, a number of cases were transferred through Rafah, Egypt, to other countries. I don't know where they all are -- some may still be in Egypt, and eleven were sent to Italy".
International aid agencies are now going public with their complaints about impeded access to the devastated Gaza Strip. "In the aftermath of the Israeli military operation in Gaza, it is critical that full and unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza be granted immediately by all parties to the conflict", AIDA complained on Saturday. The Association of International Development Agencies is a membership body and coordination forum of international non-governmental and non-profit organizations (INGOs) that share a common interest in promoting appropriate development and humanitarian programs in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).
AIDA said that "In the 23 days of conflict, Gaza has sustained severe and widespread destruction to its civilian infrastructure. According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 21,000 homes have been partially destroyed and 4,000 completely destroyed. In addition, there has been substantial damage to schools, hospitals, clinics, water and sewage facilities, electrical lines and other public facilities. These need to be repaired. As of 23 January, over 8,500 people remained in temporary shelters such as the UNRWA schools, and many more are lodged with family or friends. The United Nations says 100,000 people are now homeless. The total number of people displaced who require assistance is still unknown. A recent survey conducted by CARE shows that 86% of respondents have cash shortages and half say that food is their most urgent need. To cope families are reducing food consumption. At the same time, people do not have full access to very basic healthcare such as antibiotics, medicine for fever, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. Young children, many already malnourished before the conflict began, are extremely vulnerable to the lack of food, water and basic health services. All crossings into Gaza must be operational 24 hours a day in order to position the following items in Gaza: spare parts and fuel for the power plant, hospitals and water and sewage treatment facilities as well as tons of cement, sand and other construction materials to rebuild the destroyed schools, hospitals, clinics and homes. At the moment roughly 120-125 trucks get into Gaza each day through Kerem Shalom crossing ... Gaza needs a broad-based humanitarian response beyond providing medical aid, emergency medical treatment and small-scale relief such as food and water. Humanitarian access is woefully inadequate and we call for immediate action on the part of all parties to ensure that immediate humanitarian assistance people and goods is allowed to enter Gaza freely and that it promptly reaches those in need".
On Friday, the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to take immediate action to end Gaza's humanitarian life, in the wake of three weeks of armed conflict that caused massive loss of life and destruction.
The ICRC statement said that "This latest conflict came at a time when the population of Gaza was already suffering worsening poverty, shortages of basic goods and a lack of such basic services as proper medical care and water because of the closures and restrictions that Israel was imposing, particularly since October 2007. ".
The President of the ICRC, Jacob Kellenberger, said that "Insufficient cooperation between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas administration in Gaza had also hit the provision of essential services for the population of the Strip ... It would not be acceptable to go back to the situation prior to this latest conflict ... Political preconditions must not be allowed to affect recovery efforts. Israel's right to address its legitimate security concerns must be balanced against the Gazans' right to lead a normal and dignified life."
The European Union is reportedly applying strong pressure on Israel to facilitate massive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and an EU delegation headed by commissioner Louis Michel of Belgium is supposed to enter Gaza on 25 - 26 January.
The Erez crossing that the EU delegation would have to pass through is now closed on Saturday (for the Jewish Shabbat), and will be open other days for only very limited hours, from 8 am to 3 pm daily, and just until 2 pm on Fridays ...
Earlier in the week, CARE International issued a statement saying that at least 89% of Gazaīs 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its three-week war in December -- and 56% of Gazans are hosting displaced people in their homes.
Martha Myers, CARE Internationalīs Country Director in the West Bank and Gaza, said that "In order to meet the overwhelming needs of the population, we must have full access for humanitarian workers and material into and out of the Gaza Strip. A handful of medical staff allowed in over the past three weeks is not enough to rebuild Gaza".
The international press core based in Israel had fought for this right for months. They wrote to the authorities. They petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court. They appealed the Government's maneuvers to keep the press out of Gaza. They asked questions about the ban in press conferences from Sderot to Washington. They wrote about it. And, when the borders were open, many were there.
The Israeli military's Operation Cast Iron began with air strikes and naval shelling on 27 December, and a ground operation began on 3 January. First Israel and then Hamas each stated that they would observe unilateral cease-fires that began last Sunday.
We had been asked by the IDF to bring waivers saying that we would not hold Israel's Ministry of Defense or the Israeli army responsible for anything that happens to us. (Some of these waivers were collected, but some were not ... )
"When will you be coming back to Israel?", asked the young woman in khaki uniform sitting in the passport control booth at Erez crossing -- as if what is on the other side is, really, another country. (A European diplomat say that it is not legal for Israel to treat Gaza as another country, or to stamp passports with exit and re-entry visas. An Israeli lawyer in Tel Aviv advised a few months ago that Erez Terminal is not on the official Israeli list of its international border crossings).
Nevertheless, each passage through passport control into Gaza is treated with more deliberation than for someone leaving Israel through Ben Gurion international airport.
Perhaps this is why the stamp in the passport has changed from the one used a year ago. Now, the exit visa says, simply "Erez Terminal" (as opposed, say, to "Allenby Border Control", or "Ben Gurion Border Control"). In fact, it is really a grey area, where Israel keeps unilaterally changing the rules, mainly to reinforce its own argument that it does not still occupy Gaza.
The re-entry visa, stamped hours later, does not say anything in English, and does not indicate any time duration -- but it says "Erez Terminal" in Hebrew.
Because journalists are one of the few categories of people allowed to enter Gaza, the re-entry stamp has a notation added by hand at the passport control both, which reads "B/1" - which essentially indicates that it is a tourist visa with a working permit for foreign journalists who are not paid by an Israeli entity.
A normal tourist visa is a "B/2".
A year ago, a reentry permit from Gaza read "Erez Terminal Border Control" - and "Visit Permit B/2 - valid for 3 months".
Inside Gaza ... the Hamas border control, further inside the Gaza Strip than the Palestinian Coordination Office, inspected out passports and equipment, then waved us though.
The McClatchy Newspaper group's Jerusalem bureau chief Dion Nissenbaum wrote about trying -- and eventually succeeding -- to get into Gaza via Egypt and the Rafah crossing a few days earlier. Nissenbaum wrote that he got a Hamas-issued stamp inside his passport when he entered the Gaza Strip through Rafah a few days ago. He wrote: "Then, when all hope seemed to be lost, the gates opened and the reporters stumbled over each other to get inside. Screaming matches broke out inside the terminal and the Egyptian authorities threatened to shut the whole process down if reporters didnīt calm down. After signing yet another piece of paper vowing to leave Gaza within a certain number of days, we were all allowed to cross into Gaza. Waiting for us on the other side were the Hamas border guards in their black uniforms and beards. One of those standing watch was Ramzi, a 27-year-old border guard who pointed out the ceiling tiles knocked out of place by the Israeli bombing. Ramzi said he wasnīt Hamas, but he stood by the Hamas leaders who were democratically elected to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Though Hamas had seized military control of Gaza in 2007, Ramzi thought the U.S. and Israel had pushed Hamas into a corner ... While we waited in the terminal, the Gaza border guards stamped our passports with a specially-designed Palestinian Authority entry stamp — the first such stamp Iīve ever received for crossing into Gaza"...
Nissenbaum wrote that "From the start, it was clear that Israel had no intention of allowing journalists into Gaza to see what their military was doing ... Eventually, enterprising journalists figured out how to navigate the Egyptian bureaucracy and get into Gaza. For American reporters, it meant going to the U.S. embassy and signing an affidavit that basically cleared the U.S. of any responsibility for you in Gaza and getting a letter from the Egyptian press office ... Normally, getting to Gaza is a 50-minute drive from Jerusalem to Israelīs Erez terminal, followed by a brief stop at Israeli passport control, a walk through the high-security Israeli terminal and into the demolished Palestinian side. From there itīs a 20-minute drive to Gaza City. This time, it took 48 hours to get into Gaza"... Dion's posting can be read in full here.
The young woman reporter from Gaza who met us after we had crossed through Erez, and accompanied us through the day, said that her family survived the three-week Israeli onslaught, but their house was bombed and destroyed. They received a warning via a phone call to evacuate their house within ten minutes -- an attack was imminent. They were not told where it would be safe to go, or where not. They went to stay with relatives, and they've survived -- but, their home has been destroyed.
Houses and factories in one area we saw were completely demolished. In another area, a hospital (Al-Wafd) was clearly targetted, and had a large hole in the exact center of its facade, with marks of other firing all over. The carcasses of three cows were rotting along the side of the road. Inside Gaza City, it was one house flattened here, one mosque crushed there.
One man whose home is a pile of rubble showed us where he was sleeping, in an area created in another pile of rubble across the street from his former home, where he has created a tent out of blue-and-white striped plastic sheeting, and where he has placed a thin mattress on a concrete slab floor. He told us he had sent his two sons to live with relatives in Deir al-Balah, while he was staying by his former home. "We have nothing now. I will wait here for help from the United Nations".
The owners of two small factories destroyed not far away, and some of their employees, were huddled on a small hill of rubble of a former enterprise, sitting in a circle around a small camp-fire they had made of broken concrete blocks. With flames produced from burning pieces of broken trees for fuel, they were preparing tea. They had begun to pick up pieces of material that could be salvaged, which were piled up nearby. "Some of us are here around the clock to guard what remains", they said, "otherwise we would have nothing left". They said they had seen no government officials, and that they, too, were waiting for someone to come to offer help.
Several U.S. media reports indicate that Hamas was paying for dates and coffee served in mourning tents for those who died in the Israeli military offensive that was said to have as its aim the creation of an improved security situation for Israelis in the south of the country. On Friday, there were reports that Hamas officals began distributing $500 - in crisp $100 bills - as an initial emergency grant to families whose homes had been destroyed, with more financial aid (apparently also to be denominated in dollars) to come on Sunday.
The journalists who entered from Israel carried with them Israeli shekels to pay for transportation and interpretation assistance, as well as for, food and lodging during their time inside the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government -- with, possibly, the assent of the Palestinian Authority, but this is a very murky area -- has been refusing to ship Israeli shekels inside Gaza since the military withdrawal, on the grounds that it does not want to help Hamas. The European Community, however, has been pushing for the currency shipment, to pay the salaries of the loyal Palestinian Authority employees, as well as social assistance such as pensions and welfare benefits, and for various other bills. Without that cash infusion, people do not have funds to buy anything, the Europeans stress. There are reports that Hamas wants to switch to using the U.S. dollar ...
All the people we spoke to said they were neither Hamas nor Fatah, but they wanted the emnity between the two largest Palestinian organizations ended, and unity restored. They all also said they wanted the Israelis to realize that not all Palestinians were their enemies -- they said they wanted to go back to "living together" - as it was "twenty years before".
There were green flags (Hamas) on many buildings. There were Palestinian four-color flags (white, black, green and red) flying alone, and Palestinian flags with Hamas green flags placed just above. There were yellow Fatah flags. And there were the red flags of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). There were not, in the areas we visited, any black flags of mourning -- at least, not yet.
And, there was the occasional graffiti sign on a wall, most often the word "Hamas".
As-Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza City, was quieter than before the cease-fire. "Since the cease-fire, the situation is almost normal", one doctor said ... A Danish nurse who came to Gaza for a week with the ICRC said that after the two unilateral cease-fires kicked in on Sunday, also said that the situation became almost normal. But before that, he said, there was daily mayhem.
The head of orthopedic surgery (when bones are involved, rather than just the abdomen or chest cavity, for example), Dr. Subhi Skeik, said that the first day of the attack, on 27 December, was just madness, with over 200 people brought to Shifa Hospital, many needing surgery. "We have six operating rooms", he said, "and each one is normally used for just one patient at the time. That day, we had two to three patients in each operating room, and we were also operating in the corridors, in the intensive care units, and other places that were not so good ..." his voice trailed off. "Definitely we lost lives due to the lack of capacity", Dr. Skeik said.
Dr. Skeik said that "the types of injuries we say, and the way patients were killed, showed us different injuries than we have seen before, and different weapons. A big number were exposed definitely to unusual types of weapons. There were plenty of cases where we saw minute injuries to the abdomen and chest, but inside there was massive destruction of internal organs. The pinpointed inlets cannot explain the amount of internal damage. And there were no exit wounds. Then we saw metallic objects in the abdomen. We did not remove all of them (he indicated that this was because they had to move to repair the major damage in a series of urgent cases), if they are not causing apparent blood loss. But after the surgery, when the patient should have been more or less stable, they then dramatically died. We cannot explain this way of dying -- neither us, nor the doctors from various countries who were with us. We wonder if these foreign bodies, these metallic objects, are killing the patients. Another type of wounds involved bilateral amputations (an arm and a leg, for example), or both lower limbs destroyed totally, as if cut by a knife -- and the tissues were cauterized. These patients, too, suddenly died in recovery".
In a flash of emotion, he said "we needed help during this aggression or massacre. But it came late".
A Jerusalem-based Italian journalist who has been in Gaza for about a week has been writing that the death figure (about 1,300) is too high, and has been deliberately inflated for propaganda purposes. He wrote that the true figure is only about 500, and that "the Palestinian journalists know the truth". One reason he knows this, the Italian journalist wrote, is that the hospitals are no longer full.
We asked Dr. Skeik about this. He said that "in the first three weeks, this hospital (Shifa Hospital), received so many patients that we did a triage, and gave initial treatment before evacuating the patients to local hospitals to make room for more incoming casualties. We did this two to three times a day. We were using beds in different hospitals. Then, a number of cases were transferred through Rafah, Egypt, to other countries. I don't know where they all are -- some may still be in Egypt, and eleven were sent to Italy".
International aid agencies are now going public with their complaints about impeded access to the devastated Gaza Strip. "In the aftermath of the Israeli military operation in Gaza, it is critical that full and unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza be granted immediately by all parties to the conflict", AIDA complained on Saturday. The Association of International Development Agencies is a membership body and coordination forum of international non-governmental and non-profit organizations (INGOs) that share a common interest in promoting appropriate development and humanitarian programs in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).
AIDA said that "In the 23 days of conflict, Gaza has sustained severe and widespread destruction to its civilian infrastructure. According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 21,000 homes have been partially destroyed and 4,000 completely destroyed. In addition, there has been substantial damage to schools, hospitals, clinics, water and sewage facilities, electrical lines and other public facilities. These need to be repaired. As of 23 January, over 8,500 people remained in temporary shelters such as the UNRWA schools, and many more are lodged with family or friends. The United Nations says 100,000 people are now homeless. The total number of people displaced who require assistance is still unknown. A recent survey conducted by CARE shows that 86% of respondents have cash shortages and half say that food is their most urgent need. To cope families are reducing food consumption. At the same time, people do not have full access to very basic healthcare such as antibiotics, medicine for fever, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. Young children, many already malnourished before the conflict began, are extremely vulnerable to the lack of food, water and basic health services. All crossings into Gaza must be operational 24 hours a day in order to position the following items in Gaza: spare parts and fuel for the power plant, hospitals and water and sewage treatment facilities as well as tons of cement, sand and other construction materials to rebuild the destroyed schools, hospitals, clinics and homes. At the moment roughly 120-125 trucks get into Gaza each day through Kerem Shalom crossing ... Gaza needs a broad-based humanitarian response beyond providing medical aid, emergency medical treatment and small-scale relief such as food and water. Humanitarian access is woefully inadequate and we call for immediate action on the part of all parties to ensure that immediate humanitarian assistance people and goods is allowed to enter Gaza freely and that it promptly reaches those in need".
On Friday, the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) called on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to take immediate action to end Gaza's humanitarian life, in the wake of three weeks of armed conflict that caused massive loss of life and destruction.
The ICRC statement said that "This latest conflict came at a time when the population of Gaza was already suffering worsening poverty, shortages of basic goods and a lack of such basic services as proper medical care and water because of the closures and restrictions that Israel was imposing, particularly since October 2007. ".
The President of the ICRC, Jacob Kellenberger, said that "Insufficient cooperation between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas administration in Gaza had also hit the provision of essential services for the population of the Strip ... It would not be acceptable to go back to the situation prior to this latest conflict ... Political preconditions must not be allowed to affect recovery efforts. Israel's right to address its legitimate security concerns must be balanced against the Gazans' right to lead a normal and dignified life."
The European Union is reportedly applying strong pressure on Israel to facilitate massive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and an EU delegation headed by commissioner Louis Michel of Belgium is supposed to enter Gaza on 25 - 26 January.
The Erez crossing that the EU delegation would have to pass through is now closed on Saturday (for the Jewish Shabbat), and will be open other days for only very limited hours, from 8 am to 3 pm daily, and just until 2 pm on Fridays ...
Earlier in the week, CARE International issued a statement saying that at least 89% of Gazaīs 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its three-week war in December -- and 56% of Gazans are hosting displaced people in their homes.
Martha Myers, CARE Internationalīs Country Director in the West Bank and Gaza, said that "In order to meet the overwhelming needs of the population, we must have full access for humanitarian workers and material into and out of the Gaza Strip. A handful of medical staff allowed in over the past three weeks is not enough to rebuild Gaza".
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