Animal casualties could outnumber the human deaths, but no one seems to be counting
RAMAT GAN, Israel; GAZA CITY, Gaza––“The war is still going on,” Sulala Animal Rescue founder Saeed Al Err posted to Facebook from Gaza City as a fifth day of intense combat drew to a close in Gaza and adjacent parts of Israel, and cell phone photos of dead and wounded cats, dogs, and donkeys began to appear on social media.
The estimated 3,000 Hamas guerrillas who crossed into Israel to massacre more than 1,000 Israeli civilians and at least 50 visitors from other nations on October 7, 2023 have reportedly all been repelled, leaving about 1,500 of their number dead on Israeli soil, according to Israel Defense Force statements.
About 1,200 Israelis have been killed altogether, mostly civilians, and an approximately equal number of people are reportedly dead in Gaza as October 11, 2023 dawns.
What happened to the kibbutz animals?
What has become of the thousands of animals, including chickens, dairy cattle, goats, cats, and dogs, believed to have been on the Be’eri and Kfar Aza kibbutz farming collectives that bore the brunt of the Hamas attack?
This has yet to be mentioned in Israeli government statements ad news reports from the front.
Altogether, about 20 kibbutzes came under fire on October 7, 2023.
Were animals massacred along with the human residents? Are the surviving animals receiving food and water, with many of the kibbutzim who normally look after them dead, hospitalized, or at least temporarily displaced?
ANIMALS 24-7 is still trying to find out.
Cattle, sheep, & one small zoo in Gaza
On the Gaza side of the conflict, where the average “farm” size is only half an acre according to the Washington D.C.-based Palestinian aid organization ANERA, there are some very small poultry and dairy farms, but with 2.1 million people packed into just 140 square miles, there is no fodder production to speak of, and practically no room for practicing any sort of animal agriculture on a significant scale.
Despite that, the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization estimated while fighting a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in 2017 that there were as many as 9,000 cattle and 60,000 sheep in Gaza, numbers that are almost certainly steeply diminished now, due to urban expansion into the already limited farmland.
The NAMA Zoo in Gaza City, the last of six small privately owned zoos that once operated in Gaza, as of June 2023 still had eight lions, “crocodiles, hyenas, foxes, deer and monkeys, as well as a lone ibex and a solitary wolf,” according to Reuters correspondent Nidal Al-Mughrabi.
That seems to be the most recent available information about the fate of the NAMA Zoo.
“Donkeys are everywhere”
“Donkeys are everywhere in Gaza,” reported correspondent Loay Ayyoub for the Washington Post on October 6, 2023, on the eve of the Hamas attack.
Ayyoub’s account, however, posted from Jabaliya, four miles north of Gaza City, was mostly about how donkeys have rapidly disappeared from the Gaza streets since Israel stopped allowing the sale of donkeys to Gaza in December 2021.
Ayyoub was told, he wrote, that Israeli officials “were acting at the behest of animal welfare groups after they complained of widespread mistreatment of donkeys in Gaza.”
The largest donkey breeder in Gaza, with 15 jennies and one jack, Ayyoub said, producing 10 to 12 foals per year, “can’t come close to replacing the animals who used to be shipped across the border.”
About 900 donkeys, along with 120 aging trucks, handled solid waste collection for the Gaza City’s Health & Environment Department, Ayyoub indicated.
“Streets still full of stray cats”
The animals Gaza definitely still has are abundant street dogs and feral cats.
“The streets of Gaza are still full of stray cats who don’t have shelter from the bombs, and because of this crisis, have more difficulties finding food,” Sulala Animal Rescue posted to Facebook early on October 11, 2023.
“Saeed and his daughters Du’a and Diana went out yesterday to feed them,” the posting continued.
Added Sulala Animal Rescue later in the day, “We are preparing for evacuation in case we receive a call saying that our building will be bombed. We have the crates ready. It appears that we will be without water and electricity for a long time.”
530 animals, no water, & no electricity
The sole electrical generating station in Gaza ran out of diesel fuel and shut down on October 11, 2023. Israel, the major source of electricity in Gaza, quit sending electricity soon after the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks.
Without electricity, Sulala Animal Rescue relies on a battery-powered “hot spot” to maintain communication with the outside world.
Can Sulala Animal Rescue continue to feed and water the estimated 400 dogs and 130 cats on the relatively spacious five-acre shelter site?
Saeed Al Err and family, working short-handed since employee Loay Rami Al Wadi, 19, was killed on the second day of fighting, have pledged to try.
Was the Malinois a war hero?
Even less information has been forthcoming over the past 24 hours from Let The Animals Live, of Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb, with a satellite shelter and clinic in Ashkelon.
Ashkelon is the nearest city to Kibbutz Re’im, where the war began with a Hamas massacre of approximately 260 attendees from at least 14 nations at a “Tribe of Nova” open air concert.
Let The Animals Live volunteers intended to spend October 11, 2023 distributing dog and cat food and conducting outpatient clinics in Ashkelon and Sderot.
Inbar Lieberman, 25, usually shown with her Belgian Malinois dog in photos accompanying mass media accounts, emerged as the first Israeli war hero of the conflict after leading a dozen members of kibbutz Nir Am in standing off a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Lieberman reportedly killed five terrorists herself, while her team killed 20 more during a four-hour siege.
The dog may have alerted Lieberman to the approach of the terrorists, barking in response to explosions from nearby kibbutzes that were already under fire, but if so, no one seems to have mentioned it.
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The horrific abuse of animals in Gaza shouldn’t surprise us, as was reported in a previous article: https://www.animals24-7.org/2013/11/19/videotaped-eid-al-adha-slaughter-cruelty-in-gaza-shocks-australia/
The atrocities they are now perpetrating upon human victims shouldn’t be a surprise. They are psychotic and have no respect for the value of life.