Re: Humanitarian crisis in Gaza
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 5:38 pm
Primer on the case brought by South Africa: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-ga ... -1.7079001
Displacement“Israel says it does not target journalists. It needs to explain whether it used one of its drones for a precision attack on these two journalists and why it launched strikes on those like Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, who was clearly wearing press insignia and away from direct fighting,” said [CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif] Mansour.
A couple of days prior, the same paper reported that 'voluntary immigration' is now becoming the government's preferred approach to dealing with Gaza,Israel is in talks with Rwanda and Chad about taking in tens of thousands of Palestinian immigrants from Gaza. Both countries expressed a basic agreement to the continuation of the discussion, in contrast to other countries that refused in principle and were not approached again. This is what a very senior political official told The Times of Israel.
According to the same source, the negotiations are underway at the Mossad and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs these days. "The business is very complex," the source told The Times of Israel yesterday. "We must promote this channel, but be very careful of the reactions in the world and also of the fear that it will be interpreted as a transfer and not a voluntary migration. That's why we work with close legal advice."
ElectricityThe voluntary immigration policy of Gaza residents is slowly becoming the leading and official policy of the government and the coalition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the go-ahead, and ministers and Knesset members from all coalition factions are following his lead.
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Minister of Intelligence Gila Gamaliel told The Times of Israel yesterday that "voluntary immigration is the best and most realistic plan for the day after the fighting."
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Yesterday, the US State Department condemned the statements of Smotrich and Ben Gvir about immigration from Gaza, calling them "inflammatory and irresponsible". Netanyahu clarified in response that "statements of this type are not the government's policy" - despite and contrary to his statement from last week.
In practice, everyone is working diligently to realize the idea. The Times of Israel has learned that the main country with which secret negotiations are currently being conducted to accept thousands of immigrants from Gaza is the Congo. According to a senior official in the political-security cabinet, "Congo will be ready to receive immigrants, and we are in negotiations with other countries."
If you look globally, worldwide, right now, there are about a hundred and twenty-nine thousand people who are in I.P.C. Phase 5, meaning a catastrophic type of hunger. A hundred and twenty-nine thousand. In Gaza, there are five hundred and seventy-seven thousand. If you add these two numbers together, you can say that you have about seven hundred thousand people in the world who are in I.P.C. Phase 5, of which five hundred and seventy-seven thousand are in Gaza. That means that eighty per cent of the people, or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now. This is also what makes it unprecedented. [my emphasis]
Haaretz has also reported that the IDF psychological warfare unit has been running a Telegram channel sharing extremely graphic content of dead Palestinians alongside dehumanising language,No explanation, no justification or excuse could ever cover up this horror. It would be best if Israel's propaganda machine didn't even try to. No stories of "Hamas is responsible for it all," and no excuses pointing to Hamas hiding among civilians. Horror of this scope has no explanation other than the existence of an army and government lacking any boundaries set by law or morality.
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The clichés are hackneyed and pathetic: "They started," "there is no choice," "what would you have us do?" "The IDF is doing everything it can to avoid the killing of innocent people." The truth is that Israel doesn't care, it doesn't even take any interest.
After originally denying their involvement, the IDF later admitted it was operated by members of the Influencing Department but claim it was unauthorised.An October 11 post read: "Burning their mother… You won't believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch. We'll post it right away, get ready." Photos of Palestinian men captured by the IDF in the Strip and the bodies of terrorists were captioned: "Exterminating the roaches… exterminating the Hamas rats… Share this beauty." A video of a soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat is captioned: "What a man!!!!! Greases bullets with lard. You won't get your virgins." Another caption was: "Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you'll die laughing."
On October 14, alongside the caption "Exclusive video of a good night, don't forget to share and repost" was a video of an Israeli vehicle repeatedly driving over the body of a terrorist. "Very good, Gershon!!! Run him over run him over!!!! Screw the bastards! Flatten them," the accompanying text read.
- On 2 February, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) expressed their shock at the recent killing of three members of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Gaza. One staff member and one volunteer were killed near the gate of the Al Amal Hospital on 31 January and another staff member was killed on 2 February at the PRCS headquarters, in the same compound as the Al-Amal hospital. The deaths followed several days of shelling and fighting around the hospital, which hindered access to the facility and created panic and distress among patients and thousands of displaced people.During the original investigation, sources told Haaretz that members of the unit, which is in charge of psychological warfare targeting the enemy and foreign audiences, created 72 Virgins – Uncensored on October 9, two days after the war began, without official approval and without being authorized to do so. Furthermore, the channel was directed at an Israeli audience.
The BBC are reporting that more than half of Gaza's buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The article, like the Guardian article above, has satellite photos showing before and after which are simply shocking in the level of destruction.Using satellite imagery and open-source evidence, the investigation found damage to more than 250 residential buildings, 17 schools and universities, 16 mosques, three hospitals, three cemeteries and 150 agricultural greenhouses.
Entire buildings have been levelled, fields flattened and places of worship wiped off the map in the course of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza...
Swathes of agricultural land [around the north-eastern city of Beit Hanoun] have been erased, visible in satellite imagery from Planet Labs taken on 30 November. Most of the agricultural greenhouses have been destroyed and new paths from armoured vehicles are now strewn across the growing area. An analysis by UNOSAT in December found that 39% of agricultural land in north Gaza had been damaged.
An entire residential neighbourhood of more than 150 buildings has been flattened. Also destroyed were schools, including one run by the UN that was blown up by Israeli forces in mid-December.
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The Guardian analysis found a cemetery bulldozed and mosques damaged or destroyed. Among them is the Umm al-Nasr mosque, parts of which date back to 1239, which is damaged.
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At the heart of al-Zahra sit three universities, mostly damaged and surrounded by craters.
Of them, Israa University was blown up by Israeli forces this month, after being used as a military base. After footage of the explosion prompted the Biden administration to ask the IDF for clarification, they announced a probe into its circumstances...
The al-Zahra tower blocks, reportedly home to more than 3,000 people, were flattened by Israeli bombing.
Among the organizers of the protests is the Tikvah Forum, a group composed of families of Israeli hostages who favor a more hardline response to Hamas...
The group is to the right of the main hostage families’ organization, which favors a deal to free the captives.
A group of Israeli military reservists is also participating in the protest.
The marchers’ public demands reflect the outlook of some members of the ruling coalition. Among their proposed policies are an Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, encouraging Palestinians to leave the territory, and a credo that places “our warriors above all” — a nod to the idea that Israel should use means that put Palestinian civilians at risk in order to protect the lives of soldiers.
The article has before and after photos allowing you to see how many people have fled to the area, only to be bombed once again.The latest satellite images also show how close the strikes were to areas filled with temporary structures housing people who have been forced from their homes.
Israel has repeatedly told Palestinians living in north and central Gaza to move south for their own safety - but fighting has now come to these very areas.
Humanitarian AccessThe gravel-paved road is one of a number of Israeli efforts to reshape the topography of the Gaza Strip—and give its military freedom of movement and a tighter grasp on the territory...
The building and expansion of the road comes as the Israeli military is also building a roughly 1 kilometer buffer zone just inside Gaza’s border with Israel, where Palestinians would be barred from entry.
U.S. officials have warned Israel repeatedly against altering Gaza’s borders or carving up its territory. They have publicly voiced opposition to the creation of a buffer zone.
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The revamped road also could effectively create a militarized belt across Gaza that could aid in preventing the return of around 1 million Gazans who fled to the south amid Israeli bombardment and calls for evacuations in the early months of the war, according to analysts. The route will be guarded by Israeli troops to prevent militant attacks, one of the military officials said.
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Israeli combat engineers are planning to destroy houses and other structures along the road’s flanks and are already laying a new base of gravel to widen the corridor and make it more militarily useful, according to footage aired on Israel’s Channel 14 on Saturday. A military spokesman declined to comment on the report.
Health careThe teens, and a smattering of people in their 20s, have come from all over Israel. They say that humanitarian aid to Gaza helps Hamas, and they’ll block it even if it means innocents starve.
Ben Shabat argues sugar and flour can be used to make bombs. “When you mix flour with potassium nitrate you get an explosive for a warhead,” he says. “Every pound of sugar and flour that goes into Gaza from Israel, we will get it back by the way of a rocket that will kill our children.”
The tactic is also about starvation. “When a soldier is hungry, he’s not fighting so well.”
And the children? “Nobody can say children are bad,” he says. But “the children from the past were murdering and raping and kidnapping” on Oct. 7.
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Every explosion in Gaza raises a cheer.
“Dead, dead, dead Arabs,” one camper shouts at a roaring volley of outgoing fire. Then she notes the presence of a reporter. “Hamas,” she corrects herself.
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The IDF referred questions on why the protesters were allowed to remain at the crossing to COGAT, the Defense Ministry agency that oversees Palestinian civil affairs and crossing points. COGAT did not respond to requests for comment. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said it could not provide data on how many trucks have been disrupted at the crossing. The office does not have a presence at the border point.
CNN has more on the raid,The raid [on the Nasser Medical Complex] appears to be part of a pattern of attacks by Israeli forces striking essential life-saving civilian infrastructure in Gaza, especially hospitals. Our Office has documented similar raids in Gaza City, North Gaza, Middle Gaza and in Khan Younis, with serious consequences for the safety of patients, medical and other staff, as well as civilians sheltering in these facilities.
The LA Times has a piece by a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who went to volunteer in Gaza in late January.Israeli forces shelled the hospital early Thursday [1 February 2024], killing and injuring an “undetermined number of people,” according to Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Since the attack, one of their colleagues remains unaccounted for.
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The news came after doctors and medical officials in southern Gaza said Israeli snipers had shot dead a number of people as they tried to flee the Nasser hospital. An eyewitness to the shootings, who is a trauma surgeon at the hospital, said at least two people were killed by snipers on Tuesday, with more shot and injured.
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Video filmed on Tuesday at the hospital shows columns of smoke at its perimeter, an Israeli bulldozer destroying a hospital perimeter wall, and an armored vehicle entering the hospital grounds. The sound of gunfire can be heard throughout.
Sewage water is flooding the emergency ward and electrical generators will stop within 72 hours if the Israeli bombardment persists, Dr. Al-Qidra, the spokesman for the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Wednesday.
Food securityI have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during the next 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation.
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Entering southern Gaza on Jan. 29, where many have fled from the north, felt like the first pages of a dystopian novel. Our ears were numb with the constant humming of what I was told were the surveillance drones that circled constantly. Our noses were consumed with the stench of 1 million displaced humans living in close proximity without adequate sanitation. Our eyes got lost in the sea of tents. We stayed at a guest house in Rafah. Our first night was cold, and many of us couldn’t sleep. We stood on the balcony listening to the bombs, and seeing the smoke rise from Khan Yunis.
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I began work immediately, performing 10 to 12 surgeries a day, working 14 to 16 hours at a time. The operating room would often shake from the incessant bombings, sometimes as frequent as every 30 seconds. We operated in unsterile settings that would’ve been unthinkable in the United States. We had limited access to critical medical equipment: We performed amputations of arms and legs daily, using a Gigli saw, a Civil War-era tool, essentially a segment of barbed wire. Many amputations could’ve been avoided if we’d had access to standard medical equipment. It was a struggle trying to care for all the injured within the constructs of a healthcare system that has utterly collapsed.
I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.
[my emphasis]
According to that report, in the Southern Gaza strip, 5% of children under the age of 2 are acutely malnourished.Of these, almost 3 per cent suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment. As the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today.
The report found that,Before the recent months’ hostilities, wasting in the Gaza Strip was rare with just 0.8 per cent of children under 5 years of age acutely malnourished. The rate of 15.6 percent of wasting among children under 2 in Northern Gaza suggests a serious and rapid decline. Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally. [my emphasis]
Al-Israa University Library and National Museum (near Gaza City)
Description of damage: Destroyed by controlled detonation by the Israeli military, including the library and National Museum which contained over 3,000 archeological artifacts. The museum was looted prior to destruction.
Al-Qarara Cultural Museum, also known as the Khan Younis Museum (Khan Younis)
Description of damage: Heavily damaged, including complete destruction of the pottery collection. Museum contains 3,500 archaeological and historical artifacts, dating back to as far as 4,000 BC.
It's painful that this issue has such a tendency to attract the worst characters, from all sides, and for it to be turned into a kind of political football.
It's been clear for a while that this, the total obliteration of Gaza, is their intention. Why else would you systematically demolish schools and other civil infrastructure even after you've taken full military control of them?
The Israeli leadership has not been smart over this. Even if they were waiting for an excuse to obliterate Gaza, and there is some evidence that they knew Hamas was planning *something*, and then Hamas go and give them the perfect excuse to retaliate, doing so with such sledgehammer-like tactics was always going to swing world-wide public opinion against them.
- According to MoH in Gaza, the death toll... has risen to 118, and tens of the 760 injured people remain in critical condition due to the lack of capacity to save their lives.As people gathered in large groups waiting for much-needed aid, they were shot at by all kinds of military equipment...
After the first round of shooting stopped, people returned to the trucks, only for the soldiers to open fire once more.
“After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul said, reporting from the scene.
This attack was not an aberration,Reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said the Israeli military “initially tried to pin the blame on the crowd”, saying that dozens were hurt as a consequence of being crushed and trampled in a stampede when aid trucks arrived.
“And then, after some pushing, the Israelis went on to say that their troops felt threatened, that hundreds of troops approached their troops in a way they posed a threat to them so they responded by opening fire,” Smith added. But they didn’t explain how those people posed a threat.
Witnesses insisted that the stampede happened only after Israeli troops started firing at people looking for food.
Manal is a 35 year old elementary school teacher. She's married with three children and lived in Gaza City before the war. She described the bombings and the decision to flee to the south."Death is everywhere. Not all the dead can be buried, not all the bodies can be extricated." That's how Maha, a 36-year-old mother of three who fled Gaza City for Rafah, describes the situation in the Strip.
"Sometimes, when they can't find and remove all the bodies that were buried during a shelling, they ask the neighbors or relatives and write the names of the dead on the wall of the house, if there's still a wall. They write that they're there, under the ruins. Maybe at some point they'll be able to extricate them."
Mohammad, 31, is a gym teacher who lives in Rafah. He started volunteering with the Red Cross and describes a bombing on 4 December 2023,"There were bodies on the sides of the road. The highway that connects the northern and southern Strip was an area full of life before the war. Now it was like testimony to our suffering: Death and destruction were everywhere, with the horrifying smell of flowing sewage and rotting bodies with flies and other insects above them.
"We walked quietly; most of the people walking marched in silence without looking right or left. You try to protect the children so they won't look. At a certain point my older son, Yazan, asked: 'Mommy, what's that smell?' That tore me up. He's 11. How can you explain the rotting bodies, all that death, to him?"
Aisha, 28, is an emergency room nurse at Kuwait Hospital in Rafah,You walk slowly among the ruins, like on eggshells, so as not to step on a body. The equipment we work with is very basic, we don't have bulldozers or vehicles for removing debris. Every time the team found a limb under the ruins – a foot, an arm, a head. And that's how they found more bodies and were able to remove some of them.
Displacement"Two weeks ago there were bombings in Rafah and a girl arrived by herself, maybe 6 years old. She was covered in blood with a serious head wound. The Red Crescent team said she had been wounded in the bombing and they didn't find her parents. I went out to the corridors and went to all the rooms. I said that there was a wounded little girl, without parents, maybe somebody knew her. Nobody knew her.
"She didn't survive. I wrapped her body in a plastic sheet, I didn't know what to write, what her name was. I went out again to check, maybe people saw something on social media, maybe somebody was looking for a little girl. Nothing.
"I think that this case was the hardest for me. Not the death itself, but its cruelty. A little girl died and was buried alone, without anybody knowing who she was and that she was gone."
One of the attendees was Orit Strook, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions, who has since given a speech in the Knesset where she said,Participants, who included influential rabbis, settlement leaders and families of soldiers fighting in the Gaza Strip, were presented with maps and detailed preparations for the re-establishment of a Jewish presence in the areas inside what is considered internationally as the borders of a would-be Palestinian state.
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It was attended by approximately 1,000 people, including 11 cabinet ministers and 15 members of the Knesset, some of them members of the prime minister’s Likud party.
According to the BBC,“There will never be a Palestinian State in the land of Israel... Every cultured person in the world knows that this land is ours, for the Israeli people and only for us.”
Humanitarian AccessGazan officials warn more than 500,000 people will have no homes to return to, and many more will not be able to return immediately after the conflict because of damage to surrounding infrastructure.
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The map below - using analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University - shows which urban areas have sustained concentrated damage since the start of the conflict.
They say at least 150,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have suffered damage. North Gaza and Gaza City have borne the brunt of this, with at least 80% of buildings in the two northern regions believed to have been damaged, but their analysis now suggests up to 64% of buildings in the Khan Younis area have also been damaged.
-- The first two days of March have seen a marginal increase in the number of trucks entering with an average 120 trucks per day entering Gaza, well below the operational capacity of both border crossings. February saw a very low number of trucks entering Gaza with an average of nearly 99 trucks entering per day. The number of trucks entering Gaza remains well below the target of 500 per day, with challenges bringing supplies in through both Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) and Rafah. UNRWA trucks have struggled to enter the Gaza Strip due to the war and the inconsistent opening of both crossings. Security to manage the crossing has been severely impacted due to the killing of several Palestinian policemen in Israeli airstrikes near the crossings in early February.Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini listed some of the obstacles to aid delivery, including lack of political will, the regular closing of the two crossing points into the enclave, as well as insecurity due to military operations and the collapse of civil order.
Food securityMaynard has worked in Al-Shifa many times over the years and says, “unequivocally”, that he saw no evidence of the hospital being used by Hamas.
“I know many doctors who’ve been there for many years, who I would trust implicitly, who are quite clear that there’s never been any evidence of military activity,” he said.
“There can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”
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He said there were days there was no running water in the operating theatres, so they could only scrub up using alcohol gel.
“The doctors and nurses were wonderful there, but they just simply couldn’t maintain a sterile environment,” he said.
“Sanitation was horrendous. Just appalling infections. There were flies in the operating theatre, flies resting on the open abdomen when we were operating.”
There were several hundred new patients coming into the emergency department every day. The sheer number of admissions was causing “a breakdown of the triage system,” Maynard said.
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But it was the “huge numbers” of wounded children that he said would “never, ever leave me.”
He saw many malnutrition cases amongst the surgical patients in Al-Aqsa and paediatrician colleagues told him they were seeing around two cases of Kwashiorkor a week.
Kwashiorkor typically affects children in famine hit areas, where a lack of protein causes fluid retention and their bellies to swell.
“I remember one child vividly. He was about eight or nine, and kept coming up to us asking for food because his whole family had been killed and he hadn’t eaten for three days. It was deeply distressing,” Prof Maynard said.
Senior UN Officials warned the UN Security Council on 27 February 2024 that famine was imminent in Gaza,The child deaths we feared are here, as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip.
At least ten children have reportedly died because of dehydration and malnutrition in Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Northern Gaza Strip in recent days. There are likely more children fighting for their lives somewhere in one of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, and likely even more children in the north unable to obtain care at all.
These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.
“Unfortunately, as grim as the picture we see today is, there is every possibility for further deterioration,” observed Ramesh Rajasingham, Director of Coordination at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At least 576,000 people in Gaza – one-quarter of the population – are “one step away from famine”, he reported, adding that food-security experts warn of complete agricultural collapse in northern Gaza by May if conditions persist. Further, practically the entire population of the Strip is left to rely on woefully inadequate humanitarian food assistance to survive.
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In the ensuing discussion, Council members expressed concern over worsening food insecurity in the Gaza Strip, with many characterizing the situation there as the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
Netanyahu has reaffirmed his determination to launch a ground invasion on Rafah in southern Gaza that was originally a safe city where people were told to seek shelter from bombing in the north. Its population has grown from around 172,000 to 1.5 million and is right on the border to Egypt, meaning there is nowhere else to flea to should the IDF invade.The new route is wider than a typical road in Gaza, excluding Salah al-Din.
Imagery analysis also shows that buildings along the route, which appear to be warehouses, were demolished from the end of December until late January. This includes one building several stories high.
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Justin Crump, a former British Army officer who runs Sibylline, a risk intelligence company, said the new route was significant.
"It certainly looks like it's part of a longer-term strategy to have at least some form of security intervention and control in the Gaza Strip," said Mr Crump.
Food securityExplosions and shootings shook the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital and surrounding neighborhoods as Israeli forces stormed through the facility for a second day Tuesday. The military said it had killed 50 Hamas militants in the hospital, but it could not be independently confirmed that the dead were combatants.
The raid was a new blow to the Shifa medical complex, which had only partially resumed operations after a destructive Israeli raid in November. Thousands of Palestinian patients, medical staff and displaced people were trapped inside the sprawling complex Tuesday as heavy fighting between troops and Hamas fighters raged in nearby districts.
James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) visited Gaza this week and was shocked by what he saw,Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide.
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“We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts. Israel is not just targeting civilians, it is trying to damn the future of the Palestinian people by harming their children.”
The Guardian has a visual guide to the man-made obstacles to getting aid to Gaza that's well worth a look.“As soon as you drive through the north, you get that universal gesture of hunger of people putting their hands to their mouths. A lot of children, women with very gaunt faces. In [the city of] Khan Younis, there is utter annihilation.
“I’ve not seen that level of devastation in 20 years with the UN. People’s coping capacity in the north has been smashed and in the south it is hanging by a thread,”
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“We are seeing severe malnutrition cases … Children who are on the brink of death, just skin and bones … and these are the ones who have managed to get to hospital. There is a real fear for those that can’t,” Elder said. “This is man-made and preventable.”
Medical staff at the hospital worked 36-hour shifts and then joined their families to search for clean water, food or shelter, Elder said.
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“As you drive up on the coastal road [from Rafah heading north], you see just hundreds of thousands of people. They are sleeping in the streets, on the beach, on the sand behind the beach, in any available space,” he said.