LAST UPDATE | 11 minutes ago
THE MAIN UN aid agency in besieged Gaza has warned it will have to stop operations by the end of today because it is running out of fuel.
Alarm has grown about the spiralling humanitarian crisis in heavily bombarded Gaza where one doctor said he was forced to perform emergency surgery on the wounded without anaesthetic.
President Emmanuel Macron today said that France was sending a navy ship to support the Gaza Strip’s hospitals which are at risk of collapsing under Israel’s bombing.
The ship will “leave Toulon in the next 48 hours”, the French leader said during a joint news conference in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
France will also send a planeload of medical equipment to Egypt to be transported into the war-torn Palestinian territory.
Israel has cut off impoverished Gaza’s usual water, food and other supplies, and fewer than 70 relief trucks have entered since the war started – “a drop of aid in an ocean of need”, warned UN chief Antonio Guterres.
Israel launched withering strikes on Gaza in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas militants who, while launching a massive rocket barrage, killed more than 1,400 people and took 222 hostages on 7 October, according to Israeli authorities.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “eliminate Hamas” and Israeli bombing has now killed more than 5,800 people in Gaza, many of them children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which said overnight strikes killed at least 80 people.
Inside the battered Palestinian territory, Abu Ali Zaarab, whose family house in Rafah was bombed, charged angrily that “they’re not waging war on Hamas, they’re waging war on children… It’s a massacre”.
Tempers flared at the United Nations where Guterres decried the “epic suffering” in Gaza and the “collective punishment” of its 2.4 million residents, drawing a furious response from Israel.
“Mr secretary-general, in what world do you live?” replied an infuriated Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who recounted graphic accounts of civilians including young children killed in the deadliest single attack in Israeli history.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign, writing on X, formerly Twitter, that the UN chief had “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder”.
US President Joe Biden – who has strongly backed Israel’s war after what he called the “barbaric” Hamas attacks, but also brokered the entry relief trucks via Egypt – shared the concern that the aid lifeline is “not fast enough”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “food, water, medicine and other essential humanitarian assistance must be able to flow into Gaza” and that “humanitarian pauses must be considered for these purposes”.
‘This is a tragedy’
On the 19th day of Israeli air and artillery strikes and a near-total land, sea and air blockade of Gaza, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA warned operations are at breaking point.
“If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the Gaza Strip,” said the agency which provides aid to 600,000 displaced in Gaza, where many families have slept in the open.
Israel has refused to allow fuel shipments into Gaza, fearing Hamas will use it for weapons and explosives and accusing the militant group of stockpiling supplies in large tanks.
Aid groups have warned that more people will die if medical equipment, water desalination plants and ambulances stop running in Gaza, where the only power plant went offline weeks ago.
Patients are already being treated on the floors of hospitals overwhelmed with thousands wounded by bombing. The Red Cross has warned that hospitals, once the generators stop running, “turn into morgues”.
“We performed a number of surgeries on the wounded without anaesthetic,” said Ahmad Abdul Hadi, an orthopaedic surgeon working in the emergency room of Nasser hospital, Khan Yunis.
“It’s tough and painful, but with the lack of resources, what can we do?”
Alamy Stock Photo A Palestinian man wounded in the Israeli air strikes on Rafah in southern Gaza Strip, is transported to Al-Najjar Hospital Alamy Stock Photo
Aid agencies report that shelters and emergency tent cities are heaving under the weight of an estimated 1.4 million displaced – more than half the population of the 40km long coastal strip.
Air strikes have kept hitting Gaza, where Israel says it is targeting Hamas sites, including tunnels and munitions depots, but where many residential buildings have been reduced to rubble.
Crisis diplomacy
The Gaza war has sparked fears of a regional conflagration if it draws in more of Israels’ enemies – especially Iran-backed groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah which has already traded deadly cross-border fire with Israel.
Israeli strikes also killed eight soldiers early today in the south of Syria, another Iran ally, state media reported, in what the Israeli army said was a response to earlier rocket fire.
Blinken told the UN Security Council that Washington “does not seek conflict with Iran” but also warned that “if Iran or its proxies attack US personnel anywhere, make no mistake, we will defend our people, we will defend our security – swiftly and decisively”.
Hezbollah leader met with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior representatives in Beirut today to discuss how “to achieve real victory… in Gaza and Palestine” and stop Israel’s “brutal aggression”, a statement said.
French President Emmanuel Macron – the latest Western leader headed to the region for crisis diplomacy – was in Jordan after visits to both Israel and the Palestinian territories and was later headed to Egypt.
Israel has meanwhile continued to mass tens of thousands of troops outside Gaza ahead of a ground offensive that has been anticipated for more than two weeks.
Military planners acknowledge it would mean difficult urban combat in a densely populated area latticed by tunnels and would imperil remaining civilians and the hostages.
“There are a lot of obstacles,” an Israeli soldier serving with the military engineering corps told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“The enemy is spraying rockets and other things that I cannot detail to prevent us from progressing.”
Alamy Stock Photo Yocheved Lifshitz, one of the two freed hostages, speaks to media in front of Ichilov Hospital, after she was released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip Alamy Stock Photo
So far Hamas has released four hostages after mediation involving Qatar and Egypt, including Israeli Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who later spoke of the “hell” of her abduction.
She recalled how gunmen raided her kibbutz home, threw her over the back of a motorbike and beat her as they raced back into Gaza, recounting that “they hurt me very much”.
She and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper were released on “compelling humanitarian” grounds, according to Hamas, and Lifshitz also said the hostages were treated well once they were being held in captivity.
Both of their octogenarian husbands are still in Gaza along with more than 200 other Israeli and foreign hostages.
West Bank
In the West Bank, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, the health ministry has said.
Violence had already spiralled in the West Bank before the Gaza war, with the highest death toll in the Palestinian territory since at least 2005.
Many of the Palestinian deaths came in raids by Israeli troops, but there has also been a rise in violence between Palestinians and Israeli settlers which has seen civilians as well as fighters killed on both sides.
Since October 7, killings have surged in the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, with the Palestinian death toll reaching 101 Palestinians, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.
Over the same period, the Israeli military has reported one member of the security forces killed while taking part in a raid.
© AFP 2023