By Press TV website
Shahd Abusalama hasn’t slept for days, constantly thinking about her family in the besieged Gaza Strip, who have been displaced after the Israeli regime’s evacuation orders.
On Friday, her mother went out to get some bread, accompanied by her brother, uncle and cousins as they had “run out of bread” two days ago due to an acute shortage of essential commodities.
“When I talked to her, she couldn’t stop crying,” the UK-based Palestinian activist and academic said. “We saw death this morning. God protected us somehow,” Abusalama quoted her mother as saying.
An Israeli missile struck a place right next to the bakery where her family and other local Palestinian families had queued up to get a slice of bread.
The Israeli regime has been relentlessly bombarding the densely-populated civilian areas in the besieged territory since October 7 when the Hamas resistance group launched a surprise operation.
Most Palestinian casualties are children and women, as the Israeli warplanes have been pounding civilian areas, including hospitals, ambulances, churches, and mosques in both north and south Gaza.
Speaking to the Press TV website, Abusalama said her family has been displaced from northern Gaza to southern Gaza and they “fear Israel will eliminate them all.”
“They remain displaced from the north where our home is to the south after that criminal Israeli military order that led to the displacement of 1.1 million in Gaza,” she stated.
“And they remain under inhumane conditions, deprived and shocked by the amount of devastation and loss around them, especially amongst civilians.”
Abusalama’s mother has been working as a nurse for more than three decades in the Gaza Strip.
After the Hamas-led operation ‘Al-Aqsa Storm’ (also known as Al-Aqsa Flood), the Israeli regime launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign on Gaza and intensified the years-long crippling siege.
It also issued evacuation orders, forcing people in north Gaza to relocate to south Gaza amid the specter of the aerial blitz, including critical patients who were admitted to various hospitals.
“It’s a mad assault that knows no red lines, a genocide carried out on live TV, and the numbers of Palestinian casualties hardly reveals anything about the terrorizing and agonizing reality that entraps survivors there,” Abusalama told the Press TV website.
She said her family in Gaza and other Palestinians do not want another generation “to grow up under siege, settler-colonial occupation and apartheid.”
“They want our humanity, and rights to freedom, justice and self-determination to be recognized and our intergenerational pain of dispossession and denial of freedom and basic human rights, over 100 years of British and Israeli colonial crimes, to be acknowledged,” she stressed.
On Monday, as the Israeli genocidal campaign continued in the besieged Gaza Strip, Abusalama took to X, previously known as Twitter, to say that she was “struggling to process all these horrors.”
“I got hold of my mum; we cried our eyes out out of helplessness. They’re alive but she informed me that my cousins, and their families, mostly women/ children, are under the rubble after Israeli airstrikes at Jabalia Refugee Camp,” she wrote.
Abusalama, who lives in South Yorkshire’s Sheffield city, has been a vocal advocate of Palestinian rights and a powerful voice against the Israeli occupation and apartheid.
In January last year, she was suspended from her role as an associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) on false accusations of “antisemitism”, which she rejected.
The university, citing complaints from some external bodies, said Abusalama had breached the university’s rules viz a viz anti-Semitism, which sparked a worldwide campaign in support of her.
The university was eventually forced to drop the investigation and reinstate her.
