A plea from Gaza by aid worker Giuditta Brattini: “The situation has completely collapsed in hospitals and centres, we need a ceasefire and real aid.”
Last updated 2 November – Giuditta Brattini is one of the first four Italians to leave the Gaza Strip, via the Rafah crossing, on 1 November. Following an agreement between the parties, facilitated by Qatari mediation, around 450 foreign nationals or Palestinians holding dual passports, as well as 81 seriously injured people, were authorised to leave the Strip. Along with Giuditta Brattini, an aid worker with Gazzella Onlus, those who left included Laura Canali of Human Rights Watch, Maya Papotti of Action Against Hunger, and Jacopo Intini of Cooperazione internazionale Sud Sud with his Palestinian wife Amal Khayal.
From the evening of Friday 27 October, Israel intensified its air strikes on the Gaza Strip, also launching its first ground attacks. From that same evening, and for over 30 hours, Gaza was left completely without communications: internet lines were cut, as were radio and telephone signals. What was happening exactly during those hours, up until Sunday morning, no one could know for certain — except those who were there in person.
Giuditta Brattini is one of them. An aid worker with the association Gazzella Onlus, which has been working in the Strip for many years, she is one of the 14 Italians still stranded in Gaza since the start of the siege following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. "From the afternoon of the 27th we found ourselves without connections — the local SIM cards from Jawwal and other Palestinian operators had stopped working. Israel made sure there was no more information about what was happening," she explains in a lengthy message sent on Sunday, shortly after partial restoration of the lines (apparently forced on Israel by the United States), to reassure people about her own condition but above all to bear witness to what had happened. "Obviously the justification given for the interruption was the desire to cut contacts between Hamas militants, who would then be unable to mount resistance. But we know full well that Israel is currently preventing any communications from getting out — the fact that journalists cannot enter Gaza proves it."
Giuditta Brattini, from Verona, seen in the video below giving an earlier account, is currently near Rafah, staying at an improvised Unrwa refugee centre — the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees that in the first 20 days of the siege had already lost 59 members of its staff, virtually all of them Palestinian. In recent days she had described how she had been among those forced to evacuate from Gaza City, and the dashed hopes of being able to leave Gaza via the crossing. Hers is one of the few "foreign" accounts available in these days from an area now entering its fourth week of siege, although her perspective may be partial given that communication within the Strip remains difficult. "Not all lines have been restored, but at least we are in a position to communicate with a good part of the people."
But the real point is that obviously "during these 30-plus hours without connectivity further crimes were committed against the civilian population, with continuous bombardments both in the north and south of the Gaza Strip. During the blackout and throughout the bombardments, the Palestinian families at the Unrwa camp told me they were not even able to get through to emergency services and hospitals to report that there were wounded." In plain terms: even the basic act of calling an ambulance was impossible: "People had to carry the wounded and injured on their shoulders or in cars, and try to administer first aid themselves."
Behind the communications blackout, then, according to the Gazzella Onlus activist, lies yet another violation of international law regarding the care of the wounded: indeed, the Geneva Convention stipulates that parties to a conflict must take all necessary measures to ensure care for the wounded and sick, without any discrimination. Moreover, according to Brattini, "the violations here in the Gaza Strip are now countless, from the repeated use of non-conventional weapons such as white phosphorus — now documented and attested by Amnesty International as well — to civilian targets, hospitals and churches."
Brattini paints a dramatic picture that appears to corroborate what is coming from Palestinian sources such as the Red Crescent and the Gaza Ministry of Health, even though last week US President Joe Biden had cast doubt on the accuracy of the casualty figures provided by Gaza's Health Ministry, which had by then risen to over eight thousand. "The bombardments have been continuous in these hours, including around where we are, and there are still civilians in Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Gaza City" in the north of the territory "who did not want to evacuate their homes. We still don't know what condition they are in because communications there are still cut off and were already difficult before…"
Even at the Unrwa reception centres, Giuditta Brattini reports in her message, "conditions are uninhabitable"; there are many cases of intestinal and pulmonary infections as well as skin conditions. All of this in the complete absence of "sufficient medicines to meet needs. But above all, food and water are running short and this is becoming a major problem, even for the United Nations centres." The centres are full, at capacity, while outside "many families are shouting and pushing to get in and be taken in. But unfortunately the centres are now full — if we can even use those terms — because the Unrwa centres, like the school where we are, are not centres designed to accommodate a displaced population. There is no longer any possibility of being able to take in more people while trying to guarantee a decent daily life." The UN agency itself — the only one created specifically for a particular territorial situation — announced over the weekend that its warehouses had been looted by a population desperate due to the lack of food.
Since last week, around 80 trucks of aid have entered Gaza, but what Giuditta Brattini is witnessing from inside is that "electricity continues to be absent and hospitals are now operating under desperate conditions, while the wounded keep arriving in their hundreds." And in the north of the Gaza Strip "we have been informed that Israel has called for the evacuation of the still-functioning hospitals" including Gaza City's largest, Al Shifa (which according to Israel conceals a Hamas headquarters in its underground levels), and that of Al Quds, where there are 400 wounded and thousands of refugees: the World Health Organisation has reiterated in recent hours, as it did in previous weeks, that evacuating a hospital is an impossible operation given the number of people whose lives depend on a drug, a specific treatment, or a piece of electrically powered equipment.
All of this, in Giuditta Brattini's own words, is happening "in the deafening silence of the international community, and with no direct action against the crimes that Israel is committing in total impunity". In short, the impression coming from inside is that the West is struggling to fully acknowledge what is happening in the Strip: not so much among citizens, who have taken to the streets again this weekend in many cities, including in Paris despite the ban imposed by the authorities, but rather among national governments and in the press.
