Huda Baroud

Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two… One hundred. I counted many numbers during my daily escape, Hilda*, but it didn’t work, I came home exhausted from counting, walking, and crying. I was repeating the numbers in order and attentively “so as not to distract my thoughts” as we agreed. However, my thoughts exploded from time to time like a time bomb, and there was no ceiling to shelter from so that the inertia of the numbers did not carry some of its fragments from me.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The Gaza Strip has run out of coronavirus test kits but will soon have a new laboratory capable of conducting as many as 3,000 tests a day. Gaza Health Ministry Undersecretary Youssef Abu al-Rish said the 300-square-meter (3,229-square-foot) lab is expected to be assembled and equipped by April 16. The lab will be a joint effort of Beijing Genomics Institute and Israel's AID Genomics.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Gazans had been bragging about having no coronavirus cases — until March 22, that is, when Palestinian health officials confirmed the first two COVID-19 cases in the densely populated coastal enclave. The Gaza Health Ministry said two Palestinians who returned from Pakistan and entered Gaza through Egypt tested positive for the virus March 21. They have been in quarantine in the border town of Rafah since they returned March 17.