A Palestinian spoke about the death of more than 103 relatives: “For whom to return”

Ahmad al-Ghuferi said he was stranded in the occupied West Bank city of Jericho when Israeli bombing destroyed his family’s home in Gaza City on December 8.

Ahmad told the BBC that his wife knew she was going to die and asked him to “forgive her for anything bad she ever did to me” during their last phone call.

He later learned from several surviving relatives and neighbors that a rocket had landed in front of his house. When the family fled to a relative’s house, he too was hit by an Israeli attack.

Ahmad, who had to delete photos of his three young daughters – Tala, Lana and Najla – from his phone and laptop to avoid painful reminders, says he is no longer sure whether he will ever return home.

“Who should I come back for? Who will call me dad? Who will call me beloved? My wife has told me all my life that I am like this. Who will tell me this now?” Ahmad al-Ghuferi laments.

In a heartbreaking interview, Ahmad said his daughter Najla would have celebrated her second birthday last week. Separated from his children and unable to see them or attend their funerals, the BBC reported that he still talks about them in the present tense, “his face motionless, tears rolling down his face.”

More than two months have passed since the strike, but some of his family members are believed to still be trapped under the rubble of the strike.

Fighting in the Gaza Strip has killed “at least 29,878” people to date, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

The UN says casualty figures provided by the health ministry have proven reliable in previous conflicts with Israel.

In 2022, Save the Children reported that 47% of Gaza’s population are children.

Four months into the war between Israel and Hamas, experts and insiders warn that the conflict is plunging Gaza’s civilian population into a dire humanitarian catastrophe.

“If nothing changes, famine in the northern Gaza Strip is inevitable,” Karl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, told the UN Security Council, while his counterpart at the UN humanitarian office, Ramesh Rajasingham, warned of an “almost inevitable” mass famine.

No humanitarian group has been able to provide aid to the Gaza Strip since January 23, the World Food Program has warned.

Some 97% of Gaza’s groundwater is also reportedly “unfit for human consumption” and agricultural production is beginning to collapse, warned Maurizio Martina, deputy director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Help is ready and waiting at the border, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.

The UN Population Fund recently took notice: Al-Helal Al-Emirati maternity hospital in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah reported that newborns were dying because mothers were unable to receive prenatal or postnatal care.

Premature births are on the rise, forcing staff to place multiple newborn babies in one incubator. Most of them do not survive, the report said.

Now the prospect of an Israeli invasion of Rafah has sparked global alarm over the fate of some 1.5 million civilians trapped there as a result of evacuation orders from towns further north.

Humanitarian aid group Mercy Corps, which operates in the Gaza Strip, has shared rare information about the conditions facing Palestinians trapped in Rafah.

Local resident Nasma said: “People are sleeping on the streets, in public buildings and any other empty space available. Schools and evacuation shelters are already overcrowded and partially damaged. The streets are crowded with people, you can barely walk along them. In many areas the infrastructure is damaged and we are waiting for running water, which comes once a week, for about 6 hours (if we are lucky) to try to purify and store water for the toilet.”

Another resident noted: “The bombing continues around us, as do the sounds of military aircraft. We were forced to leave our homes more than once, seeking refuge with different families in the area… It was my son’s birthday and he kept saying, “Take me home to celebrate.” I only managed to bake him a cake over the wood.”

Another person noted: “Access to basic necessities is difficult, finding food, water and medicine is a daily struggle. We depend mainly on humanitarian aid, which we receive either from schools or other charitable organizations. We also buy some groceries, vegetables and other essentials even when their prices have tripled, if not more.”

According to the chief economist of the World Food Program, Arif Hussein, by the beginning of the year, about 26% of the enclave’s population (about 577 thousand people) were hungry. Even before October, about two-thirds of the population depended on food aid, according to the organization. But with more than two million people displaced from their homes and movement in and out of the sector restricted, the situation has become completely untenable, aid groups say.

The main UN aid agency for the Palestinians said humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza had halved in February from the previous month, and the last aid convoy was allowed into the north of the enclave on January 23.