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JERUSALEM — From the Gaza Strip’s shattered north to its overcrowded south, the news that this war’s guns might fall silent, if only for four days, was met Wednesday with relief, exhaustion — and a fear that worse is still to come.
The toll already has been devastating: more than 11,100 people dead and 28,000 wounded in a besieged territory the size of Philadelphia; 1.7 million out of 2.3 million displaced. According to the United Nations, almost half of all homes in the enclave are now damaged or destroyed.
Raed Lafi, 48, lived with his two daughters in a seaside stretch of Gaza City before fleeing Israeli bombs six week ago. Now sheltering in a cramped apartment 20 miles away, they finally received a photograph this week of their home. It was destroyed, he said.
In central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, Omo Ramy al-Jabaly said she wanted a complete cease-fire and not just a temporary, “fake truce,” as Israeli strikes continued. (Video: Reuters)
“As for the truce, of course we are happy to stop the bloodshed and mass destruction, even if this stop is temporary,” he said. “But there are details in this agreement that are not convincing.” He had done the math. Four days was not enough to sift through the ruins of his home, if he could reach it at all. It was not enough time to convince his children that they were now safe, either.
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The family’s nerves were shredded. He listed the reasons. The round-the-clock Israeli air raids. The sense that nowhere in the territory was safe, “because everything is targeted: homes, schools, churches, hospitals, stones, trees and people.” The struggle to put food on the table when supermarkets ran out of basic items. In recent weeks, they had been reduced to cooking with firewood.
“For children and adults alike, no one will be sad if the bleeding stops,” he said. “But this joy is linked to anxiety.”
The two sides agreed early Wednesday to a pause and an exchange of captives, but hostilities continued into the evening. Northern Gaza shuddered under bombing that killed dozens, witnesses said. A resident of the Jabalya refugee camp, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of security concerns, told The Washington Post that the wounded were being rushed to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, one of the last remaining accessible health-care facilities in the north.
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Images shared on social media showed workers digging a mass grave for bodies recovered from the north. Men prepared the ground and prayed over bright-blue body bags. A bulldozer stood ready to fill the trench in.
Muhammad al-Najjar, an employee of Gaza’s Religious Affairs Ministry, told a Palestinian news outlet that about 110 bodies of men and women were being buried in the trench together.
The body bags were labeled with numbers, not names. They had apparently come from Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the strip’s largest medical facility, now occupied by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers have been searching for proof that Hamas had operated a command center there — Israel’s justification for attacking a hospital.
Before the conflict, al-Shifa was Gaza’s most advanced referral hospital. The Israeli operation to capture it has turned it into a place of privation and fear. A handful of doctors have stayed behind to tend to several hundred patients as they await evacuation by the United Nations.
Three-quarters of health-care facilities in Gaza have been knocked out of service during the 47-day conflict, said Jason Lee, country director for the Palestinian territories for Save the Children. Yet as the clock wound down to the expected combat pause, newly injured people continued to seek treatment.
From his home on Salah al-Din Street, the arterial road connecting Gaza between the north and the south, Muhammad al-Atrash said, he saw a neighbor and two children seriously injured by artillery as she was carrying bread and collecting firewood under an olive tree next to their home.
As he described the scene by telephone to a Post reporter minutes later, his voice trembled. Women and children in apparent distress could be heard in the background.
“What does a cessation of military actions for four days mean?” asked Atrash, 40. “I want a complete cease-fire.”
He worried that he would not be able to secure his family’s basic needs during that time. He did not trust that enough aid trucks would be able to enter Gaza through the single crossing point from Egypt that has been open for humanitarian deliveries.
“What is the benefit of having a truce that will not enable me to provide fuel, food, blankets and winter clothes that provide safety for me and my family?” he asked.
That a pause was welcome, but not enough, was echoed by major relief organizations Wednesday. “We will do all that we can to provide relief to those in need in Gaza during the four-day humanitarian pause,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a statement.
“Winter is looming,” he said, “and it will be a disaster to reignite this conflict.”
Lafi had tried to preserve a sense of normality for his daughters. Instead of watching news of the bloodshed, he said, they played age-appropriate games. “As much as possible I prevent them from going into the street so that they do not see the destruction,” he said. “I try to create a special world for them inside the room.”
Atrash’s young daughter keeps asking his mother when the war will end. For six weeks, she has not known what to tell her. But on Wednesday, she tried a new answer. She hoped it would calm her fear.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “For four days.”
The child was confused. “Does that mean we will return to bombing in four days?”
Harb reported from London. Hazem Balousha in Amman, Jordan, Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem and Ellen Francis in London contributed to this report.