At the beginning of the second week of the war in the Gaza Strip, the humanitarian situation there came to a head.

A large water treatment plant is out of order due to a lack of electricity, sewage pipe systems have been destroyed, and drinking water is becoming scarce.

The diesel for the power station is running out.

There should be no more than five hours of electricity a day.

Jochen Stahnke

Political correspondent for Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan based in Tel Aviv.

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    More than 40,000 internally displaced persons have escaped from the particularly badly bombed parts of the coastal strip. Many of them have gone to United Nations schools that are not prepared for this. On Tuesday, Israel opened the Erez and Kerem Shalom Crossings to humanitarian trucks for a short time, but closed them again after a mortar attack in the area.

    While the militias in the Gaza Strip have greatly reduced their rocket fire in the past two days, Israel attacked other targets. "At that moment I hear fire in the background, from the air, from the sea and with artillery," Omar Shaban, a political scientist in Gaza City, told the FAZ by phone. He has not left the house for days. "At times there are 150 air strikes within thirty minutes on this tiny Gaza with its 360 square kilometers," criticizes Shaban. "The people are so angry, Israel is creating its enemy for the future here." The residents of the Gaza Strip experienced their fourth war within a few years, without anything fundamentally changing.

    It is true that a ceasefire is nearer. In a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday evening, American President Joe Biden clearly expressed his will for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas for the first time. At the same time, Biden again emphasized that Israel had a right to self-defense against rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu said Tuesday that the Israeli operation "set Hamas back by years." At the same time, he announced that the attacks would continue “as long as necessary” until “the citizens of Israel are calm again”.

    So it remains uncertain when there will be a ceasefire.

    “Every minute counts,” says Shaban.

    "Every minute more people can be killed." According to the health authorities in Gaza, at least 213 people have been killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes so far;

    61 of them were children, and two well-known doctors were also killed.

    An Israeli military spokesman said 160 of those killed were Islamist fighters.

    Shaban reports that some of the high-rise buildings that Israel had destroyed, citing that Hamas also operated facilities in individual apartments, were only rebuilt after the 2014 war.

    "Now the international community should again provide two or three billion dollars for reconstruction," he criticizes.

    "I say: Invest this in peace."

    There are now Hamas flags on the Al-Aqsa Plateau 

    On the other hand, Shaban says little about Hamas in Gaza.

    “We don't see them, we don't talk to them.” The political scientist compared the escalation of violence in Hamas to a cat cornered.

    "If she doesn't know a way out, she bites." The direct reason for the attacks lies in the Israeli police operations against Muslim prayers during Ramadan in Jerusalem.

    "Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Jerusalem reacted as one nation, they were very angry at the restriction of prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque."

    Added to this are the threatened evictions in the nearby Sheikh Jarrah district, as well as the cancellation of the Palestinian election. Finally, hopes for a new approach to peace negotiations after the change of government in Washington were dashed.

    The 14 years of isolation in Gaza and the years of non-resolution of the Palestine question only fueled frustration and radicalization, says Shaban.

    Hamas flags can now also be seen on the Al-Aqsa Plateau.

    For the first time in decades, there was a joint general strike in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as in many Arab cities in Israel.

    Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians stopped working to protest against violence against Arabs in Israel, the evictions in Jerusalem and the military campaign in Gaza.

    Meanwhile, Hamas ignored one Israeli condition for a ceasefire: cessation of all fires.

    Militia missiles hit an Israeli factory near the Gaza Strip.

    Two Thai guest workers were killed in the process.