Days of terror in Gaza’s ‘Block 76’
The writer teaching in a tent classroom in southern Gaza, as part of a program run by U.S.-based NGO Rebuilding Alliance, May 2025
Ruwaida Amer writes in +972 on 21 May 2025:
In Al-Fukhari, my town in southern Gaza, we had known this moment would come since April, when the Israeli army began systematically clearing and leveling the land between Khan Younis and Rafah to create their so-called “Morag Axis.” On May 19, the order arrived. With a single stroke of the keyboard, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee stripped our hometown of its name, reducing a vibrant agricultural community of 7,000 people into a number on a military grid — “Block 76.”
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Make no mistake, this renaming — the second time Al-Fukhari has received evacuation orders during the war — is no administrative formality; it is an act of dehumanization. It is a way of telling us, “You are no longer people with homes, histories, or futures, but coordinates in a machinery of destruction.”
The past six weeks have been marked by constant tank shelling, airstrikes, and ambulance sirens transporting wounded to the nearby European Hospital. Around 80 percent of the people in our area have already fled to Al-Mawasi, the so-called “safe zone” where, just days ago, Israeli forces killed 25 displaced Palestinians sheltering in homes and tents.
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Through an educational program run by Rebuilding Alliance, a U.S.-based NGO, I work with children who have missed nearly two years of schooling, yet maintain their desire to study. Many come to class hungry and thirsty. Some have lost their parents, siblings or friends. Their mornings begin not with schoolwork, but with searching for food and clean water.
Several students have told me directly how the conditions affect their learning. “I don’t understand the science material because I’m hungry,” one said to me recently. Another explained, “I’m tired. I came here to rest, to breathe.”