When Raed Qazmouz and his group of Palestinian very first responders lastly reached Derna recently, he was stunned by the large scale of catastrophe in Libya’s flooded Mediterranean city.
The 41-year-old lieutenant colonel is the head of the Palestinian International Cooperation Agency (PICA) rescue group, whose 35 members had actually finished their week-long objective in Derna on Thursday and were on their method back to the occupied West Bank.
“The destruction is beyond all creativity,” he stated, explaining structures rooted out from their structures and purged to sea.
This was not Qazmouz’s very first objective, as he led very first reaction objectives to Pakistan after significant floods in 2022, and to Turkey after the earthquakes in February. The shock felt in Derna by him and his group– which consisted of 22 water search-and-rescue experts– was palpable.
“The individuals here informed us Derna was the most stunning city in Libya,” he stated.
“Today, you stroll through it and see absolutely nothing however mud, silt, and destroyed homes. The odor of remains is all over, the odor of death from the sea, where countless decayed remains have actually been swept away.”
‘We address the call’
That a Palestinian objective had actually gotten here to assist disaster-stricken Libyans came as a surprise to lots of, and this group of very first responders needed to combat more difficult than others to even have the ability to leave the occupied West Bank and to a global airport in Jordan.
They stood firm, Qazmouz stated, since of a belief in worldwide humanitarian concepts and the requirement of supplying humanitarian support to those in requirement, regardless of gender, faith, or race.
“When we hear a call for aid from anybody, we respond to the call, in spite of the suffering we experience as Palestinians living under Israeli profession,” he stated.
Derna and other eastern Libyan cities were struck by Storm Daniel on September 10. The heavy rains triggered the collapse of 2 ignored dams, leading to a wall of an approximated 30 million cubic metres (8 billion gallons) of water battle through Derna, ruining whole areas.
A representative for the International Committee of the Red Cross stated casualties remain in the thousands, however did not provide a particular toll given that the tally is still uncertain. The World Health Organization states an overall of 3,958 deaths have actually been signed up.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs states a minimum of 9,000 individuals are still missing out on. Price quotes are that 10s of countless the city’s 100,000 individuals have actually been displaced.
“An approximated 43,059 people have actually been displaced by the floods in northeastern Libya,” the International Organization for Migration stated on Thursday, including that a “absence of water system is supposedly driving numerous displaced out of Derna”.
The PICA objective has actually operated in 56 nations throughout Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Bringing tonnes of help to Libya
The PICA acquired more than 22 tonnes of food and humanitarian help and provided it to the Libyan authorities, Imad al-Zuhairi, assistant minister of foreign affairs and director general of the PICA, who was with the objective, informed Al Jazeera.
[D]espite the profession, Palestine can playing its function on the global phase,” he stated. “Our group’s objective originates from us having the ability to relate carefully to the suffering of others, considered that we live under Israeli profession and its policies.”
Qazmouz stated their travel was impeded by the absence of direct flights and the group was postponed by a couple of days considered that their general travel time was more than 30 hours. They were happy to have actually made it in the end.
“If we had an airport or port, we might have existed in a couple of hours,” he stated, including that other worldwide groups had the ability to go straight to their airports with all their devices and materials.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are prohibited by Israel from utilizing any of its airports and need to cross the Israeli-controlled land border with Jordan, drive to the capital Amman, and fly out of the Queen Alia International Airport.
‘Whole households, cleaned from civil computer registry’
Upon their arrival, the group established 2 shifts to work from 7am to 7pm. “We wished to work overnight, however search-and-rescue operations stopped totally during the night,” Qazmouz stated.
He explained awful scenes of individuals looking for victims, despite whether they lived or dead, including that he had actually never ever seen such scenes of damage, even in Turkey in the consequences of February’s earthquakes.
“I saw a totally damaged city,” he stated. “I saw cars and trucks on the roofings of structures, bodies on the ground, and bodies coming out of the sea.”
Qazmouz stated the city felt spooky, with whole households dead, “removed from the civil pc registry”.
“Walking around Derna, you see death all over,” he stated. “We discovered victims in areas they didn’t reside in, swept up by the floods, buried underground or purged to sea.”
Some bodies had actually remained in the water so long, Qazmouz went on to state, it was tough to determine the victims.
“We offered whatever we could,” he stated. “Hopefully, we belonged to reducing some impacts of this catastrophe on the affected Libyan individuals.”