Israeli strikes on Gaza kill dozens in hours as hunger spreads
▶ Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan face 2.3% GDP loss, which may double if war lasts six more months, UN study says
Israel carried out at least 18 attacks over the course of a few hours, killing at least 179 people and wounding 303, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
The barrage came as the UN warned hunger is spreading and what little aid has entered Gaza is being intercepted by crowds trying to grab a share for their families.
“A large number of people remain under rubble and on the roads” as emergency responders struggle to reach them, ministry spokesman Dr Ashraf Al Qudra said.
One of the Israeli targets on Thursday was Kamal Al Adwan Hospital, which has become a “theatrical display of Israeli military operations”, Dr Al Qudra said. Patients have been killed on the grounds outside.
“The wounded and sick are being asked to evacuate the hospital, which currently lacks the facilities required to treat them effectively,” he said. Many of those leaving the hospital have been killed by Israeli fire, Dr Al Qudra added.
The lives of at least 12 babies in the hospital’s intensive care unit were in danger due to a lack of milk and life-support equipment, he said.
Israel has detained at least 70 medical workers, most notably Dr Ahmad Al Kahlout, head of Kamal Al Adwan, who was arrested on Tuesday.
Dr Al Qudra accused Israel of aiming to destroy Gaza’s medical infrastructure, to force people to leave the enclave.
“The medical situation in the south of Gaza is the worst it has been” since the war began, he said.
The UN’s World Food Programme announced half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million were starving.
“People are stopping aid trucks, taking the food and eating it right away,” Philippe Lazzarini, who leads the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva.
“This is how desperate and hungry they are,” he said. The situation has deprived hundreds of thousands of food as they shelter in UN-run schools in the south of Gaza.
“We meet more and more people who haven’t eaten for one, two or three days,” Mr Lazzarini said.
The economic cost of the Israel-Gaza war for neighbouring Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan could reach $10 billion this year and push more than 230,000 people into poverty, a UN study has found.
The three Arab countries are facing fiscal pressure, slow growth and steep unemployment. This has deterred much-needed investment into their economies and hit consumption and trade.
The study undertaken by the UN Development Programme said the cost of the war for the three countries in terms of GDP loss could reach $10.3 billion, or 2.3 per cent – a figure that could double if the conflict lasts for another six months.
“This is a massive impact,” said Abdallah Al Dardari, UN assistant secretary general and director of the UNDP’s regional bureau for Arab states, who led the study.
“The crisis was a bomb in an already fragile regional situation. It soured sentiment with fear of what could happen and where things are going.”
Israel claims it wants to annihilate Hamas, which controls Gaza, in retaliation for the militant group’s attack on southern Israeli towns on October 7, which killed about 1,200 people.
However, the Israeli campaign has drawn international condemnation for what have been described as indiscriminate attacks against civilians. About 18,800 people have been killed, mostly women and children, since Israel launched its ground and air offensive in Gaza, and more than 50,000 have been wounded, the enclave’s Health Ministry said.
Thousands more are believed to be buried underneath rubble or beyond the reach of ambulances.
Mr Al Dardari said the scale of destruction in Gaza within such a short period of time is unprecedented, at least since the Second World War.
“To lose 45-50 per cent of all housing in one month of fighting … we have never seen anything like this, the relationship between destruction level and time, it’s unique,” he said.
The mass displacement of almost 80 per cent of Gaza’s population since the start of the conflict has passed that caused by the Syrian civil war, which began more than a decade ago and set off the world’s biggest refugee crisis. “It took Syria five years of fighting to reach the same level of destruction that Gaza reached in one month,” said Mr Al Dardari, also a former deputy prime minister for economic affairs in Syria.
Mr Al Dardari, an expert on reconstruction in conflict zones, said his team was already contacting development funds and multilateral financial institutions on postwar rebuilding for Gaza.
“We are not waiting until the battles end. This effort has begun,” he said.
Economic repercussions are already being felt. Retailers in Jordan reported that recent Black Friday sales were significantly weaker than hoped for, while the country has been in the grip of industrial action in protest against Israel’s operation in Gaza.
Tour operators in Jordan, where tourism accounts for more than 10 per cent of GDP, also say they have seen a fall in bookings since the war began.
The IMF warned earlier this month that tourism could be particularly vulnerable if the conflict spreads, as it has done in recent weeks, with a surge in attacks on ships in the Red Sea and clashes on the IsraeliLebanese border.
Overall, the IMF said, economic activity in the region “was already expected to slow, falling from 5.6 per cent in 2022 to 2 per cent in 2023”.
It took Syria five years of fighting to reach the same level of destruction that Gaza reached in one month
ABDALLAH AL DARDARI UN Development Programme
On a recent reporting trip to Israel, several people I interviewed also had questions for me. Most were variations of this: “Why is the world calling for a ceasefire, when Israel is fighting terrorists?”
After nearly two weeks in the country, the reason for this disconnect became apparent. Israelis by and large weren’t seeing the full extent of what is happening in the Gaza Strip. For instance, I only ever saw brief references to the soaring death toll in Gaza, which is on track to hit 20,000 within days.
I’m not a Hebrew speaker but when Israel’s English-language newspapers and TV network did talk numbers, these were usually presented as an apparent exaggeration by the “Hamas-run” Gaza health authorities. Israel has also stressed that many thousands of the dead are combatants, and that any civilian casualties ultimately are the responsibility of Hamas, which uses Gaza residents as human shields.
I was particularly struck while watching news coverage in Jerusalem. In Jewish neighbourhoods, televisions ran rolling updates from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his hawkish Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – who said Israel is fighting “human animals” in Gaza – and from spokesmen giving the latest on the military’s Operation Swords of Iron.
News crews also had a permanent presence in “Hostages Square” in the plaza outside the art museum in Tel Aviv, and story after story was dedicated to the plight of those still missing. But a short walk away into occupied East Jerusalem, home to much of the city’s Arab population, things could hardly have been more different. Televisions were tuned in to Arab news outlets, with the horrors of what was unfolding in Gaza’s hospitals, neighbourhoods and camps being broadcast in vivid detail.
In homes, barbershops, restaurants and grocery stores, images of the devastation are being etched into the collective psyche. There must be no downplaying the abomination of October 7 for the Israeli people, a day that saw more Jewish people murdered than at any other time since the Holocaust.
Israel remains a country in shock and thousands of its young men and women are fighting on the front lines, so a focus on the trauma of the Hamas attack and the plight of the 137 remaining
By shielding Israelis from the military’s campaign in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli media is doing a disservice
hostages is natural for a society in shock and facing fear.
But by shielding Israelis from the military’s intensely destructive campaign in the Gaza Strip, where entire districts have been wiped out, some elements of the Israeli media are doing a disservice, leaving many people struggling to comprehend why the global conversation moved so quickly from the casus belli to calls for a ceasefire.
A case in point. On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said Israel is starting to lose global support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza, implying that the military does not care about civilian loss.
Israeli newspapers – at least the English-language ones – immediately picked up on Mr Biden’s comments criticising the government of Mr Netanyahu, particularly the extreme-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. But initial reports downplayed or ignored the bit about “indiscriminate bombing”.
Last month, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi criticised the coverage of the Israel-Gaza war by Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running newspaper.
After the left-wing paper reported an Israeli military helicopter may have wounded civilians at the country’s Supernova music festival during the October 7 Hamas attack, Mr Karhi called for the government to pull state-funded advertising. It’s by no means a situation unique to this conflict.
The US media largely failed to ask the right questions in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the story of the war was so often viewed through the prism of US military operations, and not the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
In Israel, the death toll in Gaza will become difficult to downplay, with the military forecasting at least another month of fighting.
Perhaps soon Mr Netanyahu’s government, which has shown that it is willing to ignore international calls to reduce civilian deaths, will face more domestic pressure to address the crisis.