Hospitals without electricity and water, the city without gas, and irregular food deliveries. In such circumstances, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Sarajevo spent 1.425 days of siege, during which over 10.000 people were killed, and the city was destroyed.
After Israel announced a “total blockade” of Gaza on October 10th in response to the Hamas attack, 2.2 million people could be left without food, water, and basic necessities, including medical supplies, while electricity is already out.
Messages of fear and uncertainty from Gaza
“We are very afraid,” says Dr. Azmi Mequat. This Palestinian, with Romanian citizenship, gave an interview from Gaza. He lives in the besieged territory with his wife and three children.
“Here in Gaza, we don’t have a bunker, we don’t have basements, we don’t have anything, we are staying in an apartment. It’s hard, they are bombing right and left, water comes and disappears, there is no light as of today,” Doctor Mequat emphasized at a time when information is circulating around the world that Israel has given a deadline of 24 hours for 1.1 million people to leave the north of Gaza and move to the south of that theory.
Geoffrey Nice, a former prosecutor at the Hague Tribunal, which sentenced commanders in chief for crimes committed in wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, suggests that comparisons should not be made.
“Therefore, I think it is useless and not necessarily reasonable to look for support on the basis of other cases that may have similarities but are inevitably different,” says Nice in response to a question about possible similarities between the events that the world public is currently observing in Gaza, and the atrocities that followed the Yugoslav wars.
Gaza under attack
More than 37.000 women in the coming period are at risk of giving birth without electricity or medical supplies in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association.
“We don’t know what will happen to these women and their newborn children,” adds Ammal Awadallah, executive director of the Association, days after Israel launched an attack on Gaza by sea, land, and air, an action that followed the deadliest attacks carried out by Hamas militants.
More than 1.300 people were killed in attacks by Hamas militants in Israel, among whom were 247 soldiers. In Israel’s response, 1.530 people were killed in Gaza with air and artillery strikes.
In the Gaza Strip, which is 40 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide, with an area of about 365 square kilometers, where more than two million people live, more than 400 children have already died, according to the United Nations (UN), Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
