By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) – As Israel prepares to open a ground offensive in Gaza after weeks of relentless bombardments, some residents of the Palestinian enclave say they are ready to fight the Middle East’s most powerful military with their bare hands.
“Even if all our men die, we will fight,” said Um Moatasem Al-Alami, whose house was hit by an Israeli air strike.
“We are not deterred by all they do, despite the wounds. We will get them out of our land even with our nails,” she said.
Israel says it is preparing a ground invasion, but it has been urged by the United States and Arab countries to delay an operation that would multiply the number of civilian casualties in the densely populated coastal strip and might ignite a wider conflict.
There are also fears about what a ground invasion would mean for the more than 200 hostages reported to be held there by Gaza’s ruling Islamist Hamas movement and other militant groups.
Mohammad Abu Daqqa and his family are not taking any chances especially since Israel mounted a series of small incursions. He left his home in the town of Abassan Al-Kabira east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip because of the intensity of the Israeli bombing.
They are staying in a tent inside a U.N. shelter. Like other Palestinians he does not want a repeat of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe that refers to the 1948 war of Israel’s creation that led to their mass dispossession.
In the war surrounding Israel’s founding, some 700,000 Palestinians, half the Arab population of what was British-ruled Palestine, fled or were driven from their homes, and have been denied return. Many ended up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“This is our land and they are fighting us inside it, for how long we will be in this bloodshed and this hardship?” said
Abu Daqqa. “Anyone who will come up here we will kill him, whoever comes.”
The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said on Thursday that 7,326 Palestinians had been killed in the retaliatory air strikes, including 3,038 children.
Israel and the United States say they doubt the Gaza health ministry’s figures but they have not supplied estimates of their own.
Israel says Hamas killed some 1,400 people including children in its Oct. 7 rampage.
Palestinian militants clashed with Israeli troops in at least two areas inside the Gaza Strip, the latest of several small-scale incursions, Hamas-affiliated media reported. The Israeli military did not immediately confirm the sortie.
Residents of central Gaza said they had heard what sounded like an exchange of fire as well as heavy shelling and air strikes along the border, with Israeli planes dropping flares and bombs.
Aside from the fear of losing their land, Gaza residents are facing a growing humanitarian crisis with shortages of food, water and medicine.
Some aid was allowed in from the Egyptian border but Palestinians and aid agencies say it is not nearly enough.
Israel has already tightened its blockade of Gaza, fully banning food and fuel imports and cutting the electricity supply. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has warned that the price Gaza would pay “will change reality for generations”.
At an intensive care unit of Gaza’s Nasser hospital, doctors cannot keep up with the casualties.
“We had to open new intensive-care unit, but these units are not fully equipped, they lack artificial respiratory systems and machines to monitor the patients,” said Dr. Hamouda Shaath.
“Because of the war and the current conditions we can’t receive abdominal or heart cases. The fate of those cases, patients who suffer chronic illnesses or other diseases is unknown,” he said.
The U.N. food agency said on Friday severe fuel shortages may force it to stop supplying emergency food aid to thousands of displaced families in Gaza.
“Only two of our contracted bakeries have fuel to produce bread at the moment and tomorrow there might be none,” World Food Programme (WFP) representative Samer Abdeljaber said.
“This would be a terrible blow to the thousands of families living in shelters who have been relying on the daily bread deliveries,” he said in a statement.
(Additional reporting by Alvise Armellini; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
