For more than a year, millions of Palestinians living in Gaza have been homeless, facing severe food and medical shortages and under enduring threat of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly 46,000 Gazans have been killed, local health officials said on Wednesday, in a landscape largely reduced to rubble.
So when President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if hostages taken from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 are not freed in the next two weeks, Gazans were left to wonder: if this is not hell, then what is?
“I am not sure he understands the situation here — it is already hell,” said Alaa Isam, 33, from Deir al Balah, in central Gaza.
Negotiations to end the war between Israel and Hamas are deadlocked, leaving civilians in Gaza caught in the crossfire with little hope for the future.
“We have been being killed for 15 months,” Mr. Isam said. “We have been through two cold winters in tents, two hot summers that ruined our food. We have been subject to starvation and people died out of hunger, in addition to the continuous brutal bombardment of everywhere.”
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t want to hurt the negotiation” for a hostage exchange and a cease-fire agreement that remain under discussion. Mr. Trump’s incoming top Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, is expected to join those talks in Doha, Qatar, later this week.
But Mr. Trump was explicit about threatening consequences should Hamas refuse to release about 100 remaining hostages — at least a third of whom are presumed dead — who were taken from Israeli territory and have been held since the militant group led the attack on Israel.
“It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone,” he said. “If the deal isn’t done before I take office, which is now going to be two weeks, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” Mr. Trump added.
His comments reverberated Wednesday across Gaza, including with some civilians who questioned why Palestinians would be punished and not Israel if an agreement on the hostages is not reached by Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump is inaugurated.
Akram al-Satri, 47, a freelance translator from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said he found it strange that Mr. Trump “does not realize that Gaza has been deprived of all forms of life, and that he thinks he could add to that hell while Israel had not been spared any effort in turning the lives of Gazans into something far uglier than hell.”
“All of us who witness bombs dropping over our heads daily” were living “a reality that is more destructive and miserable than hell,” he added.
While most Gazans mainly blame Israel for the death and destruction around them, many also say they hold Hamas responsible for starting the war.
Several Gazans interviewed on Wednesday said they feared a continuation of the pro-Israel policies Mr. Trump pursued in his first term, from 2017 to 2021.
In those years, the American Embassy in Israel was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Palestinians also claim as their capital, and the United States also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967.
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