ENGLISH/Back from Gaza: Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, Emergency Coordinator

Retour de terrain - Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, coordinatrice d'urgence

MSB244614

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Back from Gaza: Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, Emergency Coordinator

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Unique Identifier Code / URN MSB244614

Date taken / Date Recorded 25/08/2025 12:44 PM

Country Palestinian Territories

Commissioning section MSF-SWITZERLAND

Usage Rights (MSF) External Media, MSF Fundraising, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★ (E)

Video format h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 6m49s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 512.28 MB

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The world is watching the death of this population, and nothing is being done about it.

TXT
Gaza
Returning from the field

My name is Marie-Elisabeth Ingres and I’ve just returned from four weeks in Gaza as Emergency Coordinator.

TXT
Gaza, West Bank, Israel

I wanted to go to Gaza because I knew some staff there. It was important to see how things are on the ground, how people are living, because I don’t think we necessarily realize what the situation is like and the magnitude and seriousness of what’s happening there.

For someone like me who knew Gaza before, you don’t recognize anything; all the landmarks have gone. Miles and miles of northern Gaza have been destroyed. There are two million people crammed into an extremely small area and they no longer have access to health, food or even water in some places. And we can’t go to those places because it’s too dangerous. This means that those people’s condition is deteriorating day by day. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to treat them.

People are hungry; they’re only eating one meal a day, so obviously they’re anaemic, and the consequences are going to be increasing fragility and maybe less resistance if they get sick.

We would like to do much more, but we can’t because we’re limited by the Israelis who won’t allow us to send more supplies than we’re currently sending. So, actually, it’s really out of our hands. We’re trying to manage as best we can. There’s a great deal of solidarity, I find, between all the humanitarian organizations on the ground. But there’s a whole policy that I find quite perverse, which is to only allow drip-feeding of supplies. As a result, you can never predict; you never know how long you’re going to have supplies or fuel.

The most striking thing for me is seeing how extremely basic the living conditions have become for them when, before, everyone was living in houses with running water and electricity. It’s seeing that sea of tents in the south, as far as the eye can see. I looked for the latrines, but I didn’t find them. I don’t know if there are any, but there are certainly very few. It’s seeing small kids going to fetch water with big jerrycans, waiting with a bowl hoping that there will be a food distribution somewhere. You see people risking their lives to get food. This is the first time in my humanitarian career that I’ve seen such deadly food distributions. It’s totally unacceptable and nobody is saying anything or hardly anything; there are no rules. It’s a case of first come, first served, which means that women, children, the elderly and the disabled have no chance of accessing food. So it’s survival of the fittest. That isn’t what humanitarian assistance is about.

Something is going on that’s more than just a war. Every day we hear that a house, an apartment or a tent in the street has been bombed; maybe they were targeting someone, but around that person there were fifteen or thirty people.

It isn’t that it was perfect before; we mustn’t forget that Gaza was already under siege and that there were difficulties with the electricity supply and with medical evacuations – it was a real fight to get sick people out. It was a prison before, and it’s even more so today. People can’t leave; they’re not given the choice to stay or leave; so they’re completely trapped.

Talking to people, they say they’re tired, they’re desperate. Parents are extremely worried about their children because, while at the start of the war there was still the possibility of organizing schools, now you see children everywhere on the streets. They’re wondering what will become of this generation. You used to hear singing and dancing. Their whole memory, their whole history, is collapsing now. Today, they’re in survival mode and there’s no longer space to think, there’s no longer space to live. They just want a roof over their heads and more often than not, that roof is a tent. And they want a little food and water. That’s the reality today.

We have almost 1,000 employees in Gaza and they do all the work; we’re just there as support. They’re tired. They already have to manage their own lives, they’ve had to up sticks many times and, on top of that, they come to work every day and they keep smiling. Some of them are saying that this accumulation is starting to wear them down, because it’s been almost two years of conflict, it’s been two years of bombings, two years of movements, and also two years where every week a colleague shares that one of their relatives has died.

Every time there are talks for a ceasefire, they believe it; they think maybe it will work. Without hope, there’s no life, so they say to themselves: “you never know, it’s not going to go on like this forever, that’s not possible. The world will wake up.” It’s just that there aren’t a lot of actions criticizing what’s going on.

On returning from Gaza, I wanted to meet with certain States – of course Switzerland in particular, because it’s an important country in terms of international humanitarian law. The idea was to tell them about my experience, what I’d seen on the ground. What I asked them to do was to be more vocal, to make the situation more visible to the general public and at the diplomatic level, about respect for international humanitarian law, human rights and humanitarian assistance. It’s really our role as MSF to continue to bear witness and talk about what we see on the ground, given that foreign journalists aren’t allowed in. Let’s at least make sure our words are heard and that we encourage discussion, encourage people to talk about it, so that people can say: “no, we don’t agree with what’s going on”. At the end of the day, we’re all going to be complicit in what’s happening and we can’t just say: “We don’t have any power, we can’t do anything; it’s sad, but we can’t influence the Israelis, etc.” I think there’s a collective responsibility.