At around 4 a.m. on June 9, Osama Jamal Shalah left his shelter in Al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of farmland on the edge of Khan Younis now filled with tents. Al-Mawasi covers about 3 percent of the occupied territory and houses hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Men make repeated, gruelling treks of nearly 4 kilometres to Rafah aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, often stepping over corpses and dodging IDF gunfire and quadcopter bombs. Long waits at distribution points expose civilians to sudden shootings. Safe-zone designations have not guaranteed protection, leaving many injured, traumatized, and frequently unable to secure assistance despite repeated attempts.
Along with dozens of other men, Shalah walked in silence and dread. His destination was an aid distribution point in Rafah, in the far south of Gaza, run by the Israeli-approved, US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). He has made this trek more than six times, a gruelling walk of nearly 4 kilometres, stepping over corpses, and sometimes crawling or sprinting to dodge gunfire from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and bombs dropped by Israeli quadcopters overhead.
He reached one of the GHF sites in Rafah a couple of hours later. He waited for about ten hours for the site to open; between 3 and 4 p.m., he says, gunfire erupted. "I felt a feeling like a missile coming into me," Shalah recalls. "Within seconds, there was no one around me. Everyone else was hiding because they were all scared.... The shooting continued."
Alone and bleeding, Shalah stumbled through the chaos. "I didn't know where exactly I was hit. I pleaded to the people, 'I am injured,' but of course they were all scared. Some were too scared to raise their heads because of the shooting, and some were waiting for [the distribution centre] to open up so they could go get [aid]."
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