Gazans ‘in terror’ after another night of deadly strikes and siege

This article is published in association with United Nations.

Amid reports that Israeli strikes across Gaza overnight into Friday killed at least 64 people, aid teams once again pushed back strongly at allegations that aid is being diverted to Hamas, demanding an end to Israel’s blockade.

Updating journalists in Geneva, World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris described another night of terror in the war-torn enclave.

She said that some of those injured in the attacks had sought help from the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, even though it was now “just a shell” after 19 months of war.  

“We’ve done our best to bring it back together and they are doing their best to treat everyone, but [medical teams] lack everything needed,” she insisted.

Rejecting accusations that relief supplies have been handed over to Hamas, the WHO spokesperson said that “in the health sector, we’ve not seen that. All we see is a desperate need at all times.”

Echoing that message, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, explained that a stringent system of checks and reports to donors meant that all relief supplies were closely tracked in real time, making diversion highly unlikely.  

Even if it were happening, “it’s not at a scale that justifies closing down an entire life-saving aid operation,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said.

“If you had been in a coma for the last three years and you woke up and saw this for the first time, anyone with common sense would say this is insane.”

The development comes more than 10 weeks since the Israeli authorities stopped all food, fuel, medicines and more from reaching Gaza.  

To date, their proposal for an alternative aid distribution platform bypassing existing UN agencies – widely criticized by the humanitarian community – has not been implemented.

The result has been rising malnutrition – unknown in Gaza before the war – and looming famine, while thousands of truckloads of essential supplies have had to be stored in Jordan and Egypt, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees and the largest aid operation in Gaza.

In its latest update, OCHA said that the UN and its partners have 9,000 truckloads of vital supplies ready to move into Gaza. More than half contain food assistance which could provide months of food for the enclave’s 2.1 million people.

An inventory of the relief supplies “waiting just outside the borders to get in” illustrates their humanitarian purpose, Mr. Laerke said.

Pasta and stationary: Weapons of war?

“It includes educational supplies, children’s bags, shoes, size three to four years old and up to 10 years old; stationery and toys, rice, wheat flour and beans, eggs, pasta, various sweets, tents, water tanks, cold storage boxes, breastfeeding kits, breastmilk substitutes, energy biscuits, shampoo and hand soap, floor cleaner. I ask you, how much war can you wage with this?”

Mr. Laerke said that UN officials have held 14 meetings with the Israeli authorities about their proposed aid scheme, which if implemented would restrict aid “to only part of Gaza” and exclude the most vulnerable.

“It makes starvation a bargaining chip,” he maintained.

More than 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza since war erupted on 7 October 2023 in response to Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel, according to the health authorities.  

WHO said only 255 patients needing specialist care outside the Strip have been evacuated since 18 March leaving more than 10,000 patients – including approximately 4,500 children – who also need urgent medical attention outside Gaza.

In response to this week’s attack on the European General Hospital in Khan Younis, WHO’s Dr. Harris noted that it had been used as a meeting point for an evacuation. “That first bombing, as you probably know, destroyed two of the buses that we’d assembled to take children,” she added.

On Tuesday, the Security Council heard the UN’s top aid official Tom Fletcher call for immediate international pressure to stop Gaza’s “21st century atrocity” – a message amplified by OCHA’s Mr. Laerke:

“The situation as it has developed now is so grotesquely abnormal that some popular pressure on leaders around the world needs to happen,” he said.

“We know it is happening, I’m not saying that people are silent, because they are not. But it doesn’t appear that their leaders are listening to them.”

Israel’s Gaza policy now ‘tantamount to ethnic cleansing’: Türk

UN human rights Chief Volker Türk warned Friday that recent actions taken by Israel in Gaza – specifically Israeli strikes on hospitals and the continued denial of humanitarian aid – are “tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”

Before strikes on 13 May on the two of the largest hospitals in southern Gaza, there was already widespread devastation, with 53,000 Palestinians killed, according to local authorities, and all remaining civilians facing acute food shortages after multiple displacements.

Mr. Türk reminded Israel that they are bound by international law which “[ensures] that constant care is taken to spare civilian lives,” something which he said was clearly not the case in the 13 May hospital strikes.

“The killing of patients or of people visiting their wounded or sick loved ones, or of emergency workers or other civilians just seeking shelter, is as tragic as it is abhorrent,” he said. “These attacks must cease.”