Under Fire As an Aid Worker in Gaza Portrait of Matt Stieb : Matt Stieb / NY Magazine - Intelligencer

Article shared by Tom McDermott

An interview with UNICEF's Tess Ingram following her two week stay in Gaza and her close call in a convoy to northern Gaza.

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"We did not sleep well. The bombardments are really loud at night. The first week was really loud, walls shaking loud. It sounded like thunder.

Our lodging is a two-story house with a number of bedrooms that we’re all living and working out of. We bring in some supplies with us when we come. When I enter Gaza, I get a bit of a shopping list of rice, eggs, oranges, always coffee and chocolate. And we bring these things in with us. It’s very basic while you’re there.

For breakfast most days, it’s a little sachet of instant porridge and a large pot of coffee, and then we would go about our days. There’s a joint-operations center where humanitarian organizations meet, and there’s some desks there. Often colleagues will go there for meetings with other U.N. agencies. There’s a daily meeting there on the status of operations."

"Mustafa had been shot in the head 48 hours earlier. His dad and his grandmothers were by his bed, and they told me that he had just left their tent in the Al-Mawasi area, which is the supposed safe zone where people have been instructed to evacuate to. And he’d left the tent to go and find some parsley to add to dinner, I think, and he didn’t come back, and they found him on the ground.

...... He was going to need a medevac, but they’re really difficult to get. I came back 48 hours later to check on him, and he was gone. He had died."