Nearly 2,000 lives have been lost in the Israel-Hamas War, and thousands more fear for their lives.
Hamas launched attacks on Saturday, a blitz by land, sea and air that caught Israeli intelligence off guard.
Tuesday, Israeli warplanes hammered the Gaza Strip neighborhood by neighborhood, reducing buildings to rubble and sending people scrambling to find safety in the sealed-off territory, now suffering severe retaliation for the deadly weekend attack.
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“Our community is really hurting right now. San Diego has a 25-year History with Shar’Hanaga, a collection of communities along the Gaza border, the Gaza envelope, as we refer to it, and these were the communities that were directly attacked," Sara Brown, regional director for the Jewish Committee in San Diego said.
Brown said there are a number of needs and they keep changing.
She said the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federation of San Diego are raising money to send direct aid to those affected by the war.
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Ahlam Muhtaseb, Ph.D., a professor at Cal State in San Bernardino, said Israel had prevented more than 2.2 million Palestinians from having access to basic needs. She is hoping a humanitarian corridor will be opened to allow aid in and injured people out.
“Gaza is under total Israeli military siege,” Muhtaseb said." The Israeli minister of defense announced two days ago that he will not let electricity, water, food, power anything into Gaza."
Janet Winston, Ph.D. is a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt. She spent time in Gaza. Winston is Jewish American but has taken time to better understand the Palestinian perspective.
“For quite some time, I felt a need to learn more about Israel and Palestine as a Jewish American,” she said. “If you are a people who have been oppressed for over 75 years from an occupying force, you want to resist that oppression, you want to resist that occupation, you want to resist the theft of your home and your land and you want to resist ethnic cleansing,” Dr. Winston said.
Dr. Winston is aware of the deep physical and emotional wounds caused by the conflict.
“The pain of not knowing where your family and loved ones are, the pain of having your home destroyed, the pain of children being murdered,” Dr. Winston said.
She's also aware of the need for humanitarian relief for anyone caught in the war.
“I would say reach out to donate to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which is based in Gaza, Palestinians Relief Children's Fund, also in Gaza, and United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinian refugees in the near east,” Dr. Winston said.
