Sixteenth day of the war and Khan Yunes, the city south of Gaza, seems to have gone back to a time when cars on the streets were quite rare. Throughout the southern Gaza Strip, cars remain parked with empty tanks: fuel stations have no more petrol to sell. And another consequence is the dramatic emergency in hospitals, such as the local one in Shuhada where many dead and wounded arrived in the morning after a new Israeli bombing.
The lifeless bodies were collected in the parking lot and, in the absence of space in the morgue, the hospital asked family members to take their loved ones away as soon as possible for immediate burial. But now in Khan Yunes few people have petrol. And the funeral procession could only get underway when someone managed to find a cart pulled by a donkey on which to place the body wrapped in a blanket, and then set off towards the cemetery.
In recent hours, contradictory news had spread about the entry from Egypt of trucks with humanitarian aid (later denied by the Palestinian Red Crescent) and also about the entry of the expected fuel supplies. But the information was denied. And UNRWA (the UN body for refugees) explained that there was a movement of trucks, but it was linked to the transfer of fuel and flour from its warehouses in the south of the Strip to 7 bakers in Rafah and to 7 of Khan Yunes so that they can return to baking bread for the displaced.
UNRWA also imposed a political price: 4 shekels (one euro) for 50 pitas, the traditional Arab bread.
Today further aid has not arrived and for tomorrow - according to Mahmuda-Neirabi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent - there are still no certainties.
(Unioneonline/ss)
