Nowhere to go. No safe place to go to. Nowhere else to go. Nowhere to bury the dead. It is a litany that is repeated relentlessly in Gaza and with increasing intensity in recent days since the Israeli retaliation to the October 7 Hamas attacks began. The Gaza Strip, perhaps the most uncharted place in the world, has been a small land completely closed off from the outside world for 17 years, ever since Israel imposed the blockade around its land and sea borders, leaving Egypt to manage the southern Rafah Crossing Point. Gaza is a small strip of land where people are born, live and die without ever leaving a prison without bars. Forty kilometres from north to south, less than 10 kilometres east to west, between the Mediterranean Sea and the border with Israel.
For a suffering humanity that has already swelled the ranks of the world’s displaced, more than a million people setting out from their homes or rubbles means putting something in a bag — a bottle of water, diapers for the children, something warm to cover themselves — and finding a means of transportation, a car, a cart, in which they can pick up an elderly father who cannot walk. It means walking down a road already destroyed by bombs, dodging fighter plane raids, not having water, food, toilets or an electrical outlet to recharge the cell phone and communicate with the family.
It is an exodus on an unimaginable scale, of which we have very few images other than those that Palestinian journalists and cameramen in Gaza manage to dispatch, putting their lives at risk. No international or Western journalists have access to the Strip. (Read more)
