Gazans face cruel death by famine, warn UN agencies
GAZA STRIP: The UN humanitarian office called on Tuesday for Israel to revoke an apparent ban on food deliveries to northern Gaza from the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, saying people there were facing a “cruel death by famine.”
Israel said on Monday it would stop working with UNRWA in Gaza, accusing the aid agency of perpetuating conflict.
The agency said Israel told it that it would no longer approve its food convoys to north Gaza. Four such requests were denied since March 21, it said.
“The decision must be revoked,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke told a UN briefing in Geneva.
“You cannot claim to adhere to these international provisions of law when you block UNRWA food convoys.”
HOSPITAL SIEGE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday vowed to press ahead with Israel’s offensive and blasted a UN Security Council resolution calling for a pause in the fighting, saying it had emboldened Hamas to reject a separate proposal for a cease-fire and hostage release.
Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles surrounded a hospital in Gaza’s Khan Yunis on Tuesday, witnesses said, as the Palestinian Red
Crescent reported another facility was “out of service” due to military operations.
Witnesses at Nasser Hospital, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge from the fighting, told reporters that shots were fired at the sprawling complex in the southern city of Khan Yunis, but no raid was as yet taking place.
AIRDROP DEATHS: Twelve people have drowned trying to reach aid dropped by plane off a Gaza beach, Palestinian health authorities said on Tuesday, amid growing fears of famine nearly six months into Israel’s military campaign.
Video of the air drop obtained by media showed crowds of people running towards the beach, in Beit Lahia in north Gaza, as crates with parachutes floated down, then people standing deep in water and bodies being pulled onto the sand.
The video showed the apparently lifeless body of a bearded young man being hauled onto the beach, the eyes open but unmoving, and another man trying to revive him with chest compressions as somebody said, “It’s over.”
The health ministry in Gaza said on Tuesday that at least 32,414 people have been killed in the territory during more than five months of war.
The toll includes at least 81 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 74,787 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip.
The United States will continue dropping essential aid from the air into the Gaza Strip, the White House said on Tuesday ater Hamas called for them to end following fatal drownings and stampedes.
“Air drops are one of the many ways that we are helping to provide desperately-needed aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and we will continue to do so,” a spokesman for the National Security Council told reporters.
DOHA TALKS: Mediator Qatar said on Tuesday that talks between Hamas and Israel on a Gaza truce and hostage release are continuing, despite the warring parties trading blame over the lack of headway.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari said the talks were “ongoing,” adding there had not been “any development that would lead to thinking that one of the teams has pulled out of the negotiations.”
Ansari told a Doha news conference that Qatar welcomed the UN resolution, which he said had not had “any immediate effect on the talks.”
TEENS HOPING TO BE KILLED: The situation in war-ravaged Gaza is so desperate that teenagers are now saying they hope to be switly killed to escape the “nightmare,” a spokesman for the UN children’s agency said on Tuesday.
“The unspeakable is regularly said in Gaza,” said James Elder, spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video message from Rafah in southern Gaza, he said the agency had on Monday held a meeting with adolescents.
Several said they were “so desperate for this nightmare to end that they hoped to be killed,” he said.
FRANCE DENIAL: France’s defence minister on Tuesday denied allegations from investigative journalists that France supplied components for ammunition used by the Israeli army in its Gaza campaign.
Marseille-based firm Eurolinks had sold Israel M27 links, metal pieces used to join rifle cartridges into ammunition belts for machine guns, investigative websites Disclose and Marsactu wrote.
Such ammunition “could have been used against civilians in the Gaza strip,” they claimed.
But Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu told reporters in Paris that Eurolinks’ license to export to Israeli firm IMI Systems “only covers re-export to third countries” rather than use by the Israeli army.