A journey through Gaza’s al-Rashid Street, where hunger drives thousands to risk death chasing aid trucks each day.
Gaza City – I only recently witnessed what it’s like for the crowds waiting desperately for aid in Gaza.
I don’t see them in Deir el-Balah, but we travel north to Gaza to visit my family, and on the coastal al-Rashid Street, I saw something that made my heart uneasy about the much-discussed ceasefire in Gaza – what if it doesn’t address the aid crisis?
This crisis prompted Hamas to request amendments to the proposed ceasefire, on the entry of aid and ending the United States- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at whose gates Israel kills dozens waiting for aid every day.
Since Israel broke the last ceasefire in March, our visits to the north have become highly calculated, less about planning and more about reading the escalation levels of Israeli air strikes.
The intention to go north, formed before sleeping, is cancelled when we hear bombs.
Conversely, waking up to relative quiet could spur a snap decision. We quickly dress and pack clothes, supplies, and documents, always under one lingering fear: that tanks will cut the road off again and trap us in the north.
By the first day of Eid al-Adha, June 6, we had been avoiding visiting my family for three weeks.
Israel’s ground assault, “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, was at its peak, and my husband and I decided to stay put in hopes of avoiding the violence.
But eventually, the longing to see family outweighed fear and our daughter Banias really wanted to see her grandfather for Eid, so we made the trip.
The journeys reveal the dysfunction of Gaza’s current transport system.
A trip that used to take just over 20 minutes in a private car – door to door from Deir el-Balah to my family’s home in Gaza City – now requires multiple stops, long walks, and long waits for unreliable transport.
To reach Gaza City, we take three “internal rides” within central Gaza, short trips between neighbourhoods or towns like az-Zawayda, Deir el-Balah, and Nuseirat, often on shared donkey carts or old cars dragging open carts behind them.
Waiting for these rides can take an hour or more, the donkey carts holding up to 12 people, and car-cart combinations carrying six in the car, plus 10 to 12 in the cart.
On al-Rashid Street
Then comes the “external ride”, longer, riskier travel between governorates usually involving a crowded tuk-tuk carrying 10 passengers or more along bombed-out roads.
Since the January truce – broken by Israel in March – Israel has allowed only pedestrian and cart movement, with vehicles prohibited.
That harsh label has dominated news headlines recently, but witnessing their journey up close defies all imagination. It belongs to another world entirely.
On June 6, to fulfil Banias’s Eid wish to see her grandfather, we boarded a tuk-tuk as evening fell.
Near the western edge of what people in Gaza call al-Shari al-Jadeed (“the new road”), the 7km Netzarim Corridor that the Israeli army built to bisect the enclave, I saw hundreds of people on sand dunes on both sides of the street. Some had lit fires and gathered around them.
It’s a barren, ghostly stretch of sand and rubble, filled with the living shadows of Gaza’s most desperate.
I started filming with my phone as the other passengers explained that these “aid seekers” were waiting to intercept aid trucks and grab whatever they could.
Some of them are also waiting for an “American GHF” distribution point on the parallel Salah al-Din Street, which is supposed to open at dawn.
A bitter discussion ensued about the US-run aid point that had “caused so many deaths”. The aid system, they said, had turned survival into a lottery and dignity into a casualty.
I sank into thought, seeing this was entirely different from reading about it or watching the news.
Banias snapped me out of my thoughts: “Mama, what are these people doing here? Camping?”
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