Hunger and desperation were palpable Friday in the tent camp along the Deir al-Balah beachfront, after a month of successive evacuation orders that have pressed thousands of Palestinians into the area that the Israeli military calls a “humanitarian zone.”
The zone has long been crowded by Palestinians seeking refuge from bombardment, but the situation grows more dire by the day, as waves of evacuees arrive and food and water grow scarce. Over the last month, the Israeli military has issued evacuation orders for southern Gaza at an unprecedented pace.
At least 84% of Gaza now falls within the evacuation zone, according to the U.N., which also estimates that 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have been displaced over the course of the war.
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Water has been another casualty of the evacuations. The U.N. says the water supply in Deir al-Balah has decreased by at least 70% since the recent wave of evacuations began, as pumps and desalination plants are caught within evacuation zones.
The lack of clean water is causing skin diseases and other outbreaks. The U.N.'s main health agency has confirmed Gaza’s first case of polio in a 10-month-old baby in Deir al-Balah who is now paralyzed in the lower left leg.
Meanwhile, aid groups say it is only growing more difficult to offer help. U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Thursday that the World Food Program lost access to its warehouse in central Deir al-Balah because of a recent evacuation order.
This pre-supposes that the center should be grounded in reality while ignoring that through most of human history, reality was not a driving force in decision-making. That’s a feature of the scientific revolution, the Renaissance and Reformation periods of human history. In the grand scale of things, people-writ-large are still not accustomed to basing decisions on factuality or evidence, but on authority and myth.
Fully teaching this and why it was necessary takes years of education, unfortunately.
If we acknowledge that the right is fundamentally about traditional ways of behavior, we have to acknowledge that a purely factual and evidence-based approach is something entirely different from this. A problem occurs though, if we fail to acknowledge that purely rational people are actually in the minority. Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of people still use some myth to guide their choices, and that’s where the actual center is from a population standpoint. Look at the popularity of things like astrology.