On Wednesday and again a few minutes ago on Friday I watched news18.com which broadcasts direct scenes from Gaza, in both cases from outside the Deir al-Balah hospital in Gaza.

I saw the same scene playing out a number of times. A group of men carry a bundle which later turns out to be a dead person wrapped up in a sheet.

They deposit the bundle on the road in front of the main door of the hospital. That is where what passes for a funeral is held.

The men dispose themselves in a row (in one case the women form another row a couple of metres behind the men) and prayers are said.

Then, the prayers over, the participants mill around leaving the bundle on the road. Children run around, cars deposit people and people walk about. And all this in a Gaza that other news services describe as one big wreck whereas on news18 one can see a mosque dome seemingly intact.

This does not mean that the situation in Gaza due to the Israeli bombings and IDF (Israeli army) in retaliation for the 7 October Hamas massacre is not catastrophic with over 30,000 reported dead (Palestinian figures).

There were between one and two million caught in a tiny enclave called Gaza the size of Malta, forced to move from north to south at the beginning of the hostilities.

Supplies have been disrupted and crowds have been attacking the few lorries that have been allowed through. When one such crowd attacked a lorry a terrible crush developed and some 120 persons were killed. The Palestinians claimed IDF had shot at people while the IDF said the deaths occurred when people started trampling each other in their panic to escape.

Caught up in this tragedy, people try hard to cross the frontier with Egypt. So far, despite huge efforts, only those with foreign passports and injured people on their way to an Israeli hospital are being allowed to cross over to Egypt.

Then there are those who pay to cross, as freely admitted by the father of the girl who was brought to Malta to complete her rehab (and who was lionised by both sides of parliament the day after she arrived).

The price per person has risen vertiginously to some $7,000 in the case of adults. And over the border, in Egypt, huge crowds of husbands and other relatives besiege offices of the private company organising the cross-border trips which the Egyptian government officially frowns on but meanwhile allows.

One reason might be that revealed by an Israeli news website, N11, which said that over the past days nephews and nieces of Palestinian strongman Sinwar have crossed over to Egypt and safety. So too other relatives of other Palestinian bigwigs.

As a result too the one and only private company organising these trips has seen its revenue top one million dollars per day according to Al-Jazeera.

Obviously, given the numbers of people massed inside Gaza, this is but a trickle.

The others are massed in the huge tent city that has sprung up next to the border, bereft of water and electricity, subjected to rain and soon the fierce heat of summer.

The Americans and the Jordanians have been air-dropping packages of food on the shore. And President Biden, in his State of the Union speech on Thursday promised the US will build a sort of harbour for ships carrying badly needed supplies.

Meanwhile the hostages, or those of them that are still alive, have not been found yet and obviously Sinwar has not been captured yet, despite huge efforts. The underground city created over the past years has taken a beating.

And people are still getting killed. The bundles outside the Deir al-Balah hospital will continue to mount up.

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