Abu al-Majd, a 56-year-old father of three from Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, fled with his family to an UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah. He related on 24 October 2023:
I live with my family in Beit Hanoun. My son Amjad, 30, is married and lives with us together with his wife and their three children. Our two daughters are studying at university.
On 8 October 2023, the second day of the war, we left home and moved to the center of the Gaza Strip, to an UNRWA school near Deir al-Balah Refugee Camp. We are here together with my wife's family and my daughter-in-law’s family. We’re all staying in one room, which we partitioned into three with cloths.
We brought some mattresses and household items with us, and they gave us two blankets per family. We bought a few other things we needed.
This is our eleventh day at the school. Since we arrived we’ve been given food twice – once every five days. Each time, they gave every nuclear family 12 tins of food and four packets of salami. We weren’t given bread or any other food.
The power comes on once a day, for about an hour, because there is one generator supplying three schools one next to the other. There’s almost no water, either. They bring in a water tank once every two days, but it barely lasts an hour so I keep buying water outside. The toilets are dirty and there isn’t always water to flush them or wash your hands. There’s also nothing to clean them with.
At first I went to the bakery to buy pita bread, but that’s almost impossible now because the lines are so long. I go to the grocery store to buy biscuits or something like that instead of bread.
The school and the yard are packed with people. Children here are getting sick because it’s impossible to maintain hygiene, and maybe because of the poor quality of the water we buy. A lot of people are suffering from stomach aches and diarrhea.
My family and I try t
* The testimony was given to B'Tselem field researcher Khaled al-‘Azayzeh