KHAN YUNIS: Carting heavy cans of water through muddy streets, searching mounds of rubble for clothes, mourning lost relatives and homes — Gazans reprieved from Israeli bombardment during the truce with Hamas were still facing the daily hardships of unrest.

At a water station in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, people filled plastic containers and lugged them to homes or shelters using carts pulled by donkeys or by hand, bicycles, a shopping trolley, a wheelbarrow, even a wheelchair.

“The struggle for water happens daily, since we were first displaced until now. Even during the ceasefire, they didn’t find a solution to the water problem,” said Rami al-Rizek, displaced with his family from their home in Gaza City.

“Whether there is a truce or not, we still have no electricity, no water, and none of life’s basic necessities,” said Muath Hamdan, another man waiting at the water station.

Olive farmer says a better part of harvest wasted

It had rained, and a steady stream of children and adults trudged through mud and puddles in sandals and flip-flops on their way to the water station. The quest for water was the main activity that could be seen on the streets.

In a different area of Khan Yunis, Maryam Abu Rjaileh had returned to her home, reduced to rubble by an Israeli air strike, to search for clothes for her children. The family are now sheltering at a school, in a classroom shared with many others.

“We see our homes getting destroyed, our dreams getting destroyed, we see the efforts we put into our homes all destroyed,” said Abu Rjaileh.

“How can I describe our situation? They gave us a four-day truce, what are these four days? We come here, feel sorry for ourselves and turn back.”

Another Khan Yunis resident, Ahmed al-Najjar, said of the truce: “Four days are not enough, and forty days are not enough, and four years will not be enough to get over the pain.”

Too little, too late

While farmers in Gaza were taking advantage of the truce to harvest what was left of their olives.

Some lands were damaged by Israeli forces or the passage of military vehicles, while some farmers were displaced from their homes and unable to get back to their groves.

“The majority of the harvest was wasted,” said Fathy Abu Salah, adding that this crisis destroyed us, there’s hardly any production. He said that normally they would harvest enough olives to fill 12 containers, but this year they would fill just one.

There were other problems linked to the unrest, he said, such as a dearth of fuel to transport the olives to the nearest press. “We are trying to do this with all of the resources we have in these six days (of truce),” said Abu Salah.

“This fruit is all we have. This is how we make a living year after year,” he said while picking olives with a small team, sorting them from leaves and twigs on a groundsheet and collecting them in a wheelbarrow.

At the Wafy press in Khan Yunis, the machinery had cranked into operation weeks late. Sacks of olives were being brought in on the backs of carts pulled by donkeys.

Olives were coming down a chute that rattled from side to side before falling into the press. Thick golden oil was pouring out into a metal vat, while men waited to collect it in yellow jerry cans.

“When the truce started, we were thinking about whether or not we were going to work. But then came the problem of the olive press which needs electricity, and there is no electricity, meaning we had to find fuel, and finding fuel is a crisis that everyone is facing,” said manager Mohamed Wafy.

Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2023