Every road leads to a dead end. “Where am I supposed to go?” a Palestinian man cries after Israeli occupation warplanes flattened his house and workshop near the Jordanian Hospital in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood. Nothing reached his family for free, he says. Not the tent, not the tarps, not even the water jugs. They paid for all of it, scraping the money together while living in a tent, and now the strike has taken what little they had left.
The UN-led Shelter Cluster says Gaza needs around 121,000 tents, 561,000 tarps and 1.7 million mattresses to get through winter, yet as of November 5 there were only about 2,800 tents, 76,000 tarps and fewer than 5,000 mattresses inside the Strip, and not a single emergency shelter kit. More than 150,000 tents are sitting outside Gaza waiting for the Israeli occupation’s approval, and the International Organization for Migration says its shelter kits keep being turned away at the crossings as “dual-use” items. Supplies cover barely 17 percent of winter shelter needs, and Save the Children says winter clothing covers just 1 percent. While families wait for aid that never comes, the airstrikes keep coming.
khaled.sulttan (IG)