He promised historic revenge, and he is delivering. Israel has been mercilessly attacking the entire Gaza Strip for five days to avenge the massacre that Hamas militiamen committed in their territory last Saturday. The latest figure offered by the Gazan Ministry of Health is 1,353 dead, including children and 12 humanitarian workers (doctors and professors from UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East). Virtually all of them were murdered while working in the 93 schools that the UN has in the Palestinian territory. Until now, those buildings served as shelters.

There is no longer a safe place in Gaza where Palestinians can flee or hide; because all exits are cut off (including the Rafah crossing, the only one controlled by Egypt) and even the hospitals are being bombed (in addition to being running without electricity and using generators). Bombings that do not stop, neither day nor night. If we add to that that Tel Aviv maintains supply cuts of food, medicine, fuel, electricity and water to the Strip until Hamas releases Israeli hostages, the situation in Gaza looks a lot like hell. Mohamed Halas, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy who is now forced to live in the middle of an open field with other children, says “I hope they have mercy on us.”

Historic humanitarian crisis

But there is no mercy when something as lapidary as that is promised, like historical revenge. Israel puts the entire Palestinian people in the same bag as Hamas and, for this reason, it does not plan to stop its offensive despite the fact that some are already talking about that, in just five days, Gaza has plunged into the largest humanitarian crisis in its history. The figures confirm it: In addition to the thousand dead, there are 338,000 refugees and more than a thousand destroyed homes. Let us remember that dOf the two and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, half of them are under 14 years old.

Precisely this dramatic situation has made The UN urgently calls for a humanitarian corridor. Egypt has accepted but Hamas refuses because, they say, that would mean an evacuation of the territory. So, in the end, for one reason or another, those who pay the consequences of the senseless war are the innocent Palestinians. Many of them, as they say, die without having eaten for days.

The scenario that Hamas and Israel are drawing in Gaza has to look a lot like the end of the world.