Gazans mark anniversary for ‘year of suffering’

One year after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel unleashed war in Gaza, the Palestinian territory is unrecognizable and its residents are exhausted by displacement and shortages, with no end in sight.

“It felt like the first day of the war all over again”, said Khaled al-Hawajri, 46, as the Israeli forces bombarded his Gaza neighborhood on Monday, even as Israel marked the anniversary of the Hamas attack.

“Last night we were terrorized by the bombardments from quadcopters and tank shells,” said Hawajri, who has been displaced 10 times with his family of seven in the past year.

“We have endured a whole year in the north under bombardment, terror, and fear in the hearts of my children,” he said, adding he had stayed in Gaza’s devastated north because “there is no safe place in the entire Strip”.

On Monday, Gaza City was barely recognizable, ravaged by relentless air strikes and fighting.

Residents walked along sand-covered streets stripped of pavements, with buildings either destroyed or left without facades, while piles of rubble littered the roads.

With fuel in short supply and expensive, car traffic was almost nonexistent. Most people walked, cycled, or used donkey carts.

“There is no electricity or petroleum products. Even firewood is not available. Food is almost non-existent”, said 64-year-old Hussam Mansour, speaking from a street in Gaza City, surrounded by piles of rubble and sand.

The United Nations says 92 percent of Gaza’s roads and more than 84 percent of its health facilities have been damaged or destroyed in the war.

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– Long war –

Mansour and his sons have all been displaced, and his apartment building was destroyed in an air strike.

“Now when I walk the streets, I do not recognize them anymore,” he said.

Like Hawajri and Mansour, Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants have endured hardship, with no signs of relief, even after Israel reassigned divisions to the north of the country where troops are fighting Hamas’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

About 90 percent of the population has been displaced at least once, the United Nations says.

“Last night was one of the hardest nights of the war, as if the war had just begun!” said 46-year-old Muhammad al-Muqayyid, displaced from the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

“I never imagined the war would last this long,” he said.

“A year has gone and we have seen every kind of suffering disease, hunger, danger and loss.”

The Israeli military has been fighting Hamas in Gaza since the unprecedented attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 41,909 people, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The UN acknowledges the figures to be reliable.

A year on, Israel has yet to achieve one of its main objectives: securing the return of all those taken hostage on October 7, 2023.

Of the 251 captured that day, 97 are still held captive in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

The Israeli military is still carrying out operations in Gaza to free the hostages and crush Hamas, in power since 2007.

“There was a sudden ground invasion by tanks, and people were rushing out of their homes without taking anything with them, just carrying their children and running through the streets with fire and shells raining down on them”, Muqayyid said, referring to an Israeli military operation in northern Gaza on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Hamas keeps fighting. Its armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said it launched a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv on Monday.