Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, after Israeli airstrike, November 1, 2023.
For three consecutive days this past week—October 31 to November 2—Israel relentlessly bombed the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. The camp had already been bombed four times before.1
Israel claimed the bombings of Jabaliya were aimed at a top Hamas commander and so were justified. In reality, Israel’s bombing of Jabaliya, part of the U.S.-backed genocidal war on Gaza, was a massive attack on civilians—a war crime.
The Jabaliya refugee camp is home to 116,011 Palestinians living in a 1.4 square kilometer area, making it the most densely populated part of Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. One aid worker described the camp: “Houses are next to each other. And the widest street in Jabaliya camp is half a meter.”
Palestinians pull girl from rubble after Israeli airstrike on Jabaliya refugee camp, November 1, 2023. Photo: AP
The camp is home to people (and their descendants) who were violently forced from their homes during the 1947-48 terroristic ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—known as the Nakba, the Arab word for “catastrophe”—which was key to the founding of the state of Israel. Even before Israel launched this latest war, some 80 percent of Gazans lived in poverty, and 60 percent relied on international aid to survive. Now things are much, much worse due to Israel’s massive attacks and blockade preventing water, fuel, medicine, and other necessities from getting into Gaza.
Israel had ordered all people in northern Gaza—some 1 million people—to leave for southern Gaza, even as they bombed people trying to flee and the southern sections of Gaza. Some 30,000 remained in Jabaliya after Israel’s orders to evacuate.
During last week’s bombings of Jabaliya, the Israeli military used massive 2,000 pound bombs. Satellite photos showed that all buildings in a 27,000 square foot area were “completely flattened, with more surrounding buildings heavily damaged.”2 Whole residential blocks were devastated. Schools, homes, stores and residential buildings were collapsed with families trapped under the rubble. Grief-stricken relatives and onlookers have been frantically digging through the rubble, pulling away the remains of buildings searching for survivors—and bodies. One engineer reportedly lost at least 18 members of his family. Dead bodies wrapped in white sheets were lined up outside one hospital in the refugee camp.
One Gazan said, “The area has been completely destroyed. There are no Hamas fighters here. These are all civilians. They are all innocent people. No resistance here. There was a bakery here and houses. One of them had 100 people inside, and another had 50 people. This is destruction.… It’s a war of extermination.” 3
Another said, “I lost my whole family, 15 of them. They were innocent, just staying in the camp. What wrong did they do? All of them were killed, my sister’s house with her children, my brother’s house with his children, all of my siblings, no one left but me and my younger brother. Fifteen people, these are their names. They are innocent and kind. It’s literally a massacre.”4
All told this latest round of bombings and missile strikes killed nearly 200 and wounded hundreds more, including many children, with many others wounded or still missing, presumably buried under the rubble.5
Shrouded bodies lie outside Indonesia Hospital following Israeli airstrikes at the Jabaliya refugee camp, October 31, 2023. Photo: AP
“Doctors treating the victims described nightmarish scenes of operating without basic supplies or anesthesia,” the New York Times reports. “Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, director of the pediatric ward at Kamal Adwan Hospital, where many of the casualties from the Jabaliya strikes were taken, said the majority of the people arriving were children. Many were severely burned or were missing limbs.” Over three days, the hospital received nearly 100 who didn’t survive and some 600 wounded after Israeli bombs struck residential buildings and a United Nations school people were sheltering in. “I’ve never in my life seen injuries this bad,” Dr. Safyia said. “We saw children without heads.”
The hospital, just north of Jabaliya, has run very low on medical supplies because of the Israeli blockade. “With no anesthesia, doctors were operating on people with severe injuries using over-the-counter painkillers like paracetamol to help ease the pain. They had a limited supply of antibiotics and were using vinegar and chlorine to disinfect wounds, the doctor added. ‘The children’s screams during surgeries can be heard from outside,’ Dr. Abu Safyia said. ‘We are operating on people’s skulls without anesthesia.’”
Dr. Abu Safyia and a colleague were in the neonatal intensive-care unit when casualties from Jabaliya started arriving. He said that when they went to the emergency room to help out, “his colleague was stunned to see that two of her own children were among the dead. Her 9-year-old and 7-year-old had been killed in their home, he said, along with several of her siblings and relatives. ‘We are working at a place where at any moment we expect our children, spouses, siblings or friends to come in in pieces.’”
The hospital’s morgue was so full corpses that they were being stacked on top of one another. An official for the UN Refugee Works Agency said, “These are people who had dreams, they had lives, they had a future. It all ended.”6
