Gaza's health and humanitarian crisis

Abstract

A broken metal wheelchair stood in the ruins, crushed by the massive force of an explosion, its owner dead or in hospital. Nearby, footprints in blood marked the path of a caretaker who ran for help after fl ames engulfed the building. Elsewhere in the rubble were traces of the lives that had been quietly led here for years: a hair brush, a fan, a pencil case, a copy of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Such were the scenes at the Mabaret Palestine Society, a home for people with developmental disabilities in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, on the morning of July 12. A few hours earlier, the home had been hit by an Israeli missile. Survivors described a sudden explosion while the home’s fi ve residents and a caretaker gathered for suhoor, the last meal before sunrise in Ramadan. Two residents were killed immediately; their charred remains brought to a nearby morgue and wrapped in white shrouds. One of the dead was 37-year-old Soha Abu Sada, who had lived in the home since her parents died 13 years ago. Her elder sister Sohaila explained that Soha had been born with severe mental disability and could not talk. “She didn’t understand much, but she liked that I came to visit her”, she said, sitting outside the morgue, surrounded by desperate people looking for loved ones after the previous night’s shelling. Crying, she asked a question which no one present could answer: “why?”, she said. “Why would they hit a home for disabled people?”