UN chief: It’s past time to ‘silence the guns’ in Gaza
Heavy destruction, forced marches in ongoing Israeli raid around Gaza hospital
UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Sunday in Cairo that delivering the necessary aid to famine-threatened Gaza “requires Israel removing the remaining obstacles and chokepoints to relief.”
Guterres repeated his call for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” to alleviate “the plight of Palestinian children, women and men struggling to survive the nightmare in Gaza” during a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.
He had visited on Saturday the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, where nearly six months of war and siege have displaced the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people and destroyed its civilian infrastructure.
“Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest, and death are galloping across it,” the UN chief said.
“The whole world recognizes that it’s past time to silence the guns and ensure an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” he continued.
The Israeli government is under growing international pressure to ease its bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza, which the territory’s Health Ministry says have killed at least 32,226 people, most of them women and children. Guterres, who also met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, called the Rafah border crossing and Egypt’s El-Arish airport where assistance is sent “essential arteries for lifesaving aid into Gaza.”
“But those arteries are clogged,” he said, with massive lines of trucks piled up on the Egyptian side, only trickling in as the humanitarian situation worsens.
Calls have mounted for Israel to ease its restrictions on aid and
open more crossings into Gaza. “Palestinians in Gaza desperately need what has been promised — a flood of aid. Not trickles. Not drops,” Guterres said.
Also on Sunday, Palestinians who fled during an ongoing Israeli raid in and around the Gaza Strip’s main Al-Shifa Hospital described days of heavy fighting, mass arrests, forced marches past dead bodies and flattened buildings.
Kareem Ayman Hathat, who lived with his parents and two brothers in a five-story building about 100 meters from the hospital, said they huddled in the
kitchen for days while gunfire and explosions echoed outside, sometimes causing the whole building to shake.
Early Saturday, Israeli troops stormed the building and forced them and dozens of other residents to leave. He says the men were forced to strip to their underwear and four were detained. The rest were blindfolded and ordered to follow a tank south, as more blasts thundered around them.
“From time to time, the tank would fire a shell,” he said in an interview from another hospital in central Gaza, where he has sought shelter. “It was to terrorize us.” Jameel Al-Ayoubi, who was among thousands of people sheltering at Al-Shifa Hospital when the raid commenced last Monday, said in a phone interview that tanks and armored bulldozers had plowed into the courtyard of the sprawling medical compound, crushing ambulances and civilian vehicles.
He said he saw tanks driving over at least four bodies of people killed early in the raid.