UN stops delivery of food and supplies into Gaza

Chicago-bound train derails

AN Amtrak train heading to Chicago with 200 passengers on board derailed after striking an unoccupied vehicle on the tracks in south-western Michigan, authorities said.

The Berrien County sheriff’s office said: “The engineer and approximately 10 passengers received non-life threatening injuries and were treated by local ambulance services.”

Officials added that the train derailed but remained upright.

It happened on Thursday evening near New Buffalo in Michigan’s south-western corner.

THE United Nations was yesterday forced to stop deliveries of food and other supplies to Gaza and warned of possible widespread starvation, after internet and telephone services collapsed in the besieged enclave thanks to a lack of fuel.

The communications blackout, in its second day, largely cut off Gaza’s 2.3 million people from one another and the outside world and paralyses the coordination of aid, which humanitarian groups were already struggling to deliver because of the fuel shortage.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was unable to bring in its aid convoy yesterday, according to spokeswoman Juliette Touma.

However, the Israeli war cabinet agreed yesterday afternoon to allow two tanker trucks of fuel to enter the

Gaza Strip each day, the country’s national security adviser said - a quantity he described as “very minimal”. Tzachi Hanegbi said that the fuel would be allowed for Gaza’s communications system and water and sewage services.

Israeli forces, meanwhile, have signalled they could expand their offensive towards Gaza’s south even while pressing operations in the north. Troops have been searching the territory’s biggest hospital for traces of a Hamas command centre which the military alleges is located under the building.

They have shown what they said were a tunnel entrance and weapons found inside the compound but not yet any evidence of the command centre, which Hamas and staff at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital deny has existed.

The war, now in its sixth week, was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel, in which the militants killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured some 240 men, women and children.

Yesterday, the military said it found the body of another hostage, identifying her as Cpl Noa Marciano. Her body was recovered in a building adjacent to Shifa, the military said, like that of another hostage found Thursday, Yehudit Weiss.

More than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed in the war, twothirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The count does not differentiate between civilians and militants, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

Speaking from Shifa Hospital yesterday, Dr Ahmad Mukhalalti said there was no electricity to run ventilators to provide ICU patients with oxygen, and that of the 36 infants there, most are suffering from severe diarrhoea because there is no clean water to give them. He added that Israeli troops, who stormed into the hospital on Wednesday, had brought food and bottled water, but that it had not been enough for the number of people in the hospital.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the troops searched underground levels of the hospital on Thursday and detained technicians who run its equipment.