‘We are living through another war’
As part of the so-called peace deal negotiated by US President Donald Trump, Israeli forces were due to withdraw behind a yellow line running the length of the Gaza Strip. After 60 days, they would pull back further to a red line boundary nearer the Israeli border (see diagram, right).
An international peacekeeping force was to be in place, and reconstruction of the whole of Gaza would start. People who lived or farmed along the border with Israel would be able to return to their homes. Or so was the plan.
At the start, these boundaries were invisible so any Palestinian who strayed into the area was shot by Israeli forces. In 44 days following the agreement, 342 civilians, including children, were killed in Gaza, many in this zone.
Israel started to mark a line with massive yellow concrete blocks. But they were often placed hundreds of metres beyond the line on the map, effectively seizing more land and expelling more people from their homes. Israeli Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, announced the yellow line would become the new border.
This has reduced Gaza to less than half its size. Already one of the most densely populated areas in the world, two million people are now packed between rough seas and wet sands on one side and vast piles of rubble, rubbish and open sewage on the other.
Haj Abu Imad lives in a tent with his family in Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza, after being displaced by Israeli forces from their home in Jabalia camp, which was the wrong side of the yellow line. ‘We don’t feel that the war has ended,’ says the 55-year-old.‘They haven’t allowed us to return to our areas or even check on our homes’.
‘We are still living through another war, the war of displacement and suffering, especially with the arrival of winter.’
In northern Gaza, just two streets away from the yellow line in Beit Lahia, 28-year-old Zeina Kalab lives with her family in a partially destroyed house that barely protects them from the winter cold.
‘By five in the evening, no one dares to leave the house,’ she says. It feels like an unofficial curfew. At night, quadcopter drones fly over the area, and the sounds of explosions and blasts continue nonstop.’
Fishermen targeted by Israeli forces
The number of fishermen killed since the beginning of the war on Gaza has reached 232, including 67 who were targeted while fishing. ‘The situation is tragic…the sea is completely closed, and death pursues fishermen with every attempt to go out to seek a livelihood,’ said Zakaria Bakr, coordinator of the Palestinian fishermen’s committee at the Union of Agricultural Work
