When Ahmed Najar speaks to his nephews and nieces in Gaza, he tries to distract them.
“I say to them: life will not always be like this, the bombing and the death,” the UK-based Palestinian tells Big Issue. “But they have seen too much blood. They don’t believe me.”
“I was speaking on the phone to my nephew and I was on the balcony, and there were fireworks in the background. He was so worried – he was asking, ‘you have gunshots, are you OK? Are you being attacked too? Are you safe?’
Najar assured him that everything was fine – but the little boy wouldn’t believe him.
“I couldn’t convince him I was OK,” Najar says. “What is it doing to them? Even if they survive, what is it doing to our children?”
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Najar’s entire extended family are trapped in Gaza, where conflict has raged for more than 15 months. In October 2023, armed Palestinian group Hamas launched terror attacks across Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking a further 251 hostage. The subsequent Israeli military offensive has unleashed unprecedented devastation in Gaza, killing more than 44,000 people according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The UN’s Human Rights Office estimates that 70% of these are women and children. Najar’s three-year-old nephew, his cousin, his uncle and his grandmother are among the dead.
Ahmed Najar with his family in Gaza in 2021
For those who survive, Najar says, life is a “living hell”. Nine out of every 10 Gazans have been displaced over the course of the last year. With as much as 85% of Gaza placed under so-called evacuation orders, conditions are increasingly overcrowded and unhygienic.
“Three of my sisters fled to the south. They are living in tents in Khan Younis,” Najar says. “But my father has stayed in the north. We obviously tried to convince him to leave, but he said ‘I am 78 years old, I cannot be displaced again. I started from scratch three times in my life, I cannot be going to live in a tent again.’ So he stayed.”
Food is scarce; a military blockade prevents the majority of aid trucks from entering Gaza. Most people are surviving on just one meal every other day.
The suffering impacts “literally every person in Gaza”, says Bart Witteveen, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) country director for the occupied Palestinian territory.
“Ninety-eight percent of the 2.3 million-strong population is estimated to be at crisis levels of food insecurity,” he explains. “The main driver of this food insecurity is the access constraints.
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“What we see in the north are conditions that are very close to [what could] qualify as a siege… in the three northernmost communities, nothing is getting in.”
In November, the UN described the risk of famine in the area as “substantial and imminent”. Before his family fled the area, Najar claims, they only ate grass for an entire month. This is how his little nephew Fouad died. “He couldn’t survive on grass alone,” he says.
In November, the International Criminal Court cited limitations to food access when justifying its decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant. The court also issued a war crimes arrest warrant for Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, who is believed to be dead.
The ICC accused Netanyahu and Gallant of “impeding humanitarian aid”, “intentionally depriving” civilians in Gaza of items “indispensable to their survival”.
Their government does not represent all Israelis, says Eran Nissan, from Jaffa, Tel Aviv. Nissan is the CEO of Mehazkim, a progressive organisation advocating for peace between Israel and Palestine.
“Our corrupt and illegitimate leadership in Israel is contributing to huge suffering in Gaza. And they have abandoned the remaining hostages,” he said. Some 101 hostages remain in Hamas captivity.
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“We must condemn totally the adoption of genocidal rhetoric and support for dehumanisation and demonisation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in Gaza.”
Nissan first got involved with the peace movement after his mandatory service in the Israeli military. He “lost friends and classmates”; since 7 October, the violence has only increased.
“The leadership on both sides are sending us to kill and die,” he said. “Peace has never been so urgent.”
Domestic critics have long accused Netanyahu of stalling in truce negotiations, drawing out the war to pacify the extreme-right parties in his governing coalition.
Earlier this month, thousands of protesters took to the streets in Israel to call for a hostage return deal. Speaking to the crowd, the mother of one captive accused Netanyahu government of “rushing to pave roads and build settlements on top of the hostages who are rotting in the tunnels.”
There is little hope of a deal before Christmas which this year – for the first time since 2005 – coincides with the first night of Hanukkah. As the politicking continues, civilians in Gaza are bearing the brunt of this violence. But it can be very difficult for them to obtain health treatment; as of early December, airstrikes and forced evacuations had closed 23 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals.
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The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has stepped into this vacuum, providing lifesaving care in temporary clinics and field hospitals. But bombing also cripples such vital emergency infrastructure, explains Dr Bashar Murad, PRCS executive director.
“During this war, we have established 27 primary healthcare centres. But due to evacuation orders and attacks, 15 have been destroyed,” he says.
“No hospital has not been hit by bombing or been damaged. Nowhere is safe… every day aeroplanes shell tents inside of the humanitarian area. We don’t have any safe places. Gaza is like a big open sky prison.”
So-called ‘safe zones’ have been repeatedly attacked. For example, the al-Mawasi coastal safe zone has been targeted several times; In the deadliest attack, on 13 July, Israeli jets bombed al-Mawasi, killing 90 people and injuring 300 displaced Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
“We feel that we are on the waiting list to die in Gaza, all us civilians,” Dr Murad says.
“We have a list of patients who need no comprehensive health services, like chemotherapy, or specialised amputation, and these services we cannot provide, because we lost everything in Gaza,” Dr Bashar says.
“We have a huge number of babies with second- and third-degree burns. They need plastic surgery – but they cannot leave so they may die.”
As the humanitarian crisis mounts, calls for a ceasefire have grown. A truce would “benefit everyone”, Witteveen from IRC says. “But we are quite cynical about that, to be frank. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to keep demanding it.”
The cynicism is perhaps justified. In November, Qatar suspended its work as a mediator in ceasefire and hostage release talks between Israel and Hamas, citing an “unwillingness” on both sides to find a resolution.
Hamas has rejected any ceasefire terms that do not bring about a complete end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Israel’s hard-right government, meanwhile, appears to intend to occupy the north of Gaza long-term.
“We have belligerent parties to the conflict that are taking extreme positions, whether it be Hamas, or whether it be Israel’s government,” Witteveen explains. “This is really the frustration of the humanitarian community. Nobody’s taking the humanitarian imperative seriously.”
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Nissan remembers 7 October 2023 all too well. A volunteer medic and ambulance driver, he spent the day in a South Israeli hospital, treating survivors of Hamas’s brutal Nova music festival massacre.
He witnessed “huge suffering”. But counter-intuitively, the traumatic day reaffirmed his faith in the possibility of peace.
“I was surrounded by Jewish and Arab doctors,” he said. “Twenty percent of Israeli society are Palestinian citizens of Israel, and we were there working shoulder to shoulder. Jews and Arabs working together. It is possible.”
As the belligerent parties dig in their heels, that hope looks distant. But that, Najar says, is no excuse to give up, to stop pressuring politicians to make meaningful solutions. In the UK, he says, that means pressuring the government to uphold the ICC arrest warrant.
“Please,” Najar says. “Keep your eyes on Gaza. Don’t look away.”
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