Today, Monday, the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz published a report entitled: “A Siege Within a Siege”... The Israeli army is withholding humanitarian aid from tens of thousands remaining in the northern Gaza Strip.

The newspaper says, on October 18, a building in Al-Faluja in Jabalia camp was bombed, and inside it were 32 Palestinians, some of whom barely escaped and asked for help for those under the rubble. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) intervened and tried to enter the place, but its request was completely rejected, as happened with dozens of requests submitted last month.

The Israeli army was informing the UN that there was no longer any point in going to the place because the possibility of any of the trapped people surviving was zero.

The newspaper says: To this day, the Israeli army has not published the reason for attacking the building in Fallujah, and has not claimed that any of the victims of the attack were members of Hamas.

Giorgos Petrolios, the UN official in Gaza, says: There is a major humanitarian disaster in the northern Gaza Strip. The Israeli army refuses to allow aid in and bombs on a daily basis. Dozens of people are killed every day and for 3 weeks now the attacks have not stopped every day. There is a clear use of humanitarian aid as a weapon against civilians there.

Haaretz says: Indeed, today there are three circles of siege in the Gaza Strip subject to different restrictions: First: The entire Strip is besieged, and no one enters or leaves it except with the permission of the army.. Another siege is imposed on the entire northern Gaza Strip from the Gaza Valley area to the north, including Gaza City, the refugee camps and other areas.. Early last month, the army imposed another and more severe siege in the northern Gaza Strip, specifically in Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.. A senior UN official described it as "a siege within a siege within a siege."

The newspaper added: There are between 75 and 90 thousand citizens remaining in Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun who are unable or unwilling to leave despite the Israeli army’s demand to move south.

“When the rest are asked why they stay, they answer: It is difficult to live here and it is difficult to live there (south of the blockade), but at least here I am not living in tents,” says Petropoulos. “It does not mean that the houses in the area are intact, but in the Rafah area people sleep under nylon in harsh conditions.”

“We would rather die in Jabalya than live in tents and be humiliated,” a resident of the besieged area who refuses to leave told Haaretz. “There were difficult discussions about what to do with the children and whether to separate them, but we will stay together and die with dignity. Also, who will guarantee that we will not be bombed or shot at as soon as we leave? There is no safe place in Gaza. All the statements about a safe passage or a humanitarian zone are lies. People do not understand how dangerous it is to move from one place to another within the Strip.”

Haaretz published testimonies from many citizens about what is happening in the northern Gaza Strip with them from the stifling siege and the attempt to force them to move south, but they insist on staying there.

The newspaper says: The only entry permit to the isolated area was reserved for ambulances that arrived to transport seriously ill patients from the hospitals there to the hospital in Gaza City. This transfer requires complex coordination with the headquarters of the Israeli government’s coordination of activities. After that, a convoy goes to the hospitals, loads the patients into the ambulances and returns south, where it is asked to stop for inspection. The paramedics are asked to remove each injured person from the ambulance and walk with him for a distance of 50 meters and present him to the soldiers.

“One time when we were transporting the wounded, the officer asked us why we weren’t taking the wounded out of the ambulance,” Petropoulos says. “I said, ‘Come and see, this is a seven-year-old girl with a wound on her head where you can see her brain,’ but apparently the only way not to be a terrorist in Gaza is to be a child.” We were delayed for three hours during the examination, and all the while the paramedic continued to give the girl oxygen. We took her to the hospital in Gaza, but I don’t know if she survived.

In addition to allowing ambulances to enter, the Israeli military last month allowed food, medical equipment, fuel and blood transfusions to be transferred to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, but not all requests for that hospital in the besieged area have been granted. The area has a kidney dialysis department that treats about 65 patients.

The dialysis machines depend on the hospital's diesel to operate, and according to Petropoulos, when the fuel runs out, which could happen soon, all the patients in the ward will die.

The same applies to other chronic patients. The hospital also has an intensive care and respiratory department, but since there are no ambulances with ventilators in the Strip, they cannot be transferred to other hospitals. “They will live or die in Kamal Adwan, you cannot get them out of there,” Petropoulos explains.

He pointed out that during his visits to the hospital, he encountered cases of post-traumatic stress and psychological injuries that no one was able to treat.

The newspaper refers to the large numbers of Palestinian victims in the northern Gaza Strip, whom no medical or civil defense teams can help.

Regarding the Israeli skepticism about the number of victims, Petropoulos says: “In any case, there are dozens of deaths every day. If there are not 100 deaths but only 50, is that good? Is the killing of 50 people proportional to the killing of one person? There was a brutal attack on October 7, but the brutality has continued every day since then, and not only against the people, but also against the place where they live, the landscape, the buildings, the roads.”

About six months ago, Petropoulos witnessed an attack in Khan Younis that targeted a senior Hamas official. “It looked like Nagasaki,” he recalled. “They counted the bodies, but there were 70 people who just evaporated. When they bombed Moasi on September 10, I jumped out of bed, and there were also 10 or 20 people killed. I was in the tents before the attack and they just disappeared. I was also in the hospital after the bombing, and it looked like a slaughterhouse, there was blood everywhere.”

Petropoulos, a Greek national who lives with his family in Jordan, has been working in humanitarian aid around the world for about 20 years, 14 of them through the United Nations. He has visited Darfur, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and other countries. He has been in the Strip since January, staying there for four or five days a month. According to him, the difference between other war zones in the world and Gaza is that there is no safe place in Gaza.

He stresses: There is no such thing as a humanitarian zone in Gaza. Every place can be exposed to gunfire from any direction all the time. People here are exposed to attacks everywhere, even in areas that are described as safe. This makes everything very tragic. You have to imagine what would happen if 60 civilians were killed in Ukraine every day.

He pointed out that the Israeli army treats UN employees in humiliating ways, and makes them wait for hours for coordination in order to enter, even though they obtain prior coordination.

Petropoulos says the whole sector smells of rotting corpses coming from the rubble people are buried under, wild dogs roam with human organs in their mouths, and we collect bodies of people killed from the roads we pass that no one can reach and hand them over to the Red Cross.