By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
GAZA CITY: The shelling is incessant, hospitals are overwhelmed, children are shell-shocked, the Gaza nights are miserably cold in the windowless homes. And residents fear their nightmare could worsen. After days of intense bombardment from the air, artillery shells are now pounding the Gaza Strip as resistance fighters respond with rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli tanks.
Children, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million population, are traumatized, living in fear of the next explosion that will shake their home.
"Many kids have stopped eating. They are inactive, they barely talk, they cling to their parents all the time," said Sajy Elmaghinni, who works for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Gaza. "Children are now scared of the dark, which is a major problem because there's no electricity," added Elmaghinni, whose own home has been without power for five days.
He has no way of heating his home, where all the windows were blown out by a blast, but like others in the besieged Palestinian enclave he has become used to dealing with the cold.
"We just wear a lot of clothes," he told AFP.
But with most homes and hospitals lacking heating and with temperatures near freezing, the risk of hypothermia is particularly high for newborn babies who need higher temperatures to survive, Save the Children said.
The humanitarian group said that even before the Israeli offensive, around 50,000 children were suffering from malnutrition in Gaza, which has been under a crippling Israeli blockade since Hamas won legislative elections in 2006.
For Elmaghinni a key concern is how he'll get wife - in the ninth month of her pregnancy - to the hospital when she is due to deliver.
"This is a major concern. At the beginning of the bombing she experienced some trauma when a neighboring building was hit," he said.
"Everybody evacuated our building. We had to stay. I didn't know what to do. I prayed to God my wife would not deliver in these conditions."
A number of pregnant women have moved in with friends or relatives who live near a clinic, so as to have a doctor nearby, aware that ambulances are busy collecting the victims of the Israeli attacks.
At night it is impossible even to walk to a clinic, "because drones pick up anything that moves," says Elmaghinni.
Some of the missiles fired on Gaza are launched from unmanned aircraft that can be heard flying overhead.
Virtually everyone has a tragic story to tell in this shell-shocked coastal strip already crippled by the Israeli blockade.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=98853#
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