UN chief calls Gaza situation ‘dire’ – as it happened
You can follow the Nigeria Opinion News continuing live coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict here.
On Tuesday the friends and family of Dana Bachar and her son Carmel mourned their loss at Gan Shlomo cemetery. The pair were killed during Hamas’ 7 October attack on kibbutz Be’eri.
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Over a third of hospitals, or 12 out of 35, have shut down in Gaza and almost two thirds of primary care clinics, or 46 of 72, have closed due to damage from hostilities or lack of fuel, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA has said in its daily update.
As we reported earlier, UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees has warned that unless fuel is allowed in to Gaza immediately, it will be forced to halt all operations as of Wednesday night.
In its update, OCHA itemised some of the aid that has been allowed in over the past few days. It noted that on Sunday trucks brought in 44,000 bottles of water, enough for just 22,000 people in one day and on Monday trucks brought enough water for just 13,000 people for one day.
It noted that the Israeli military had indicated that they have attacked 400 targets, a new high since the start of hostilities and noted that residential buildings and a busy market had been among the targets. It said:
In one of the airstrikes, a residential building in Rafah was destroyed, killing 48 people and injuring dozens. In Ash Shati refugee camp, airstrikes destroyed three residential buildings overnight, resulting in 36 fatalities, with many others reportedly missing, presumably under the rubble.
Airstrikes also struck Souq An Nuseirat with at least 20 fatalities. The incident took place at noon when the market was the busiest. Shoppers were hit while they were inside a large supermarket.
The death toll in the Israeli drone strike on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank has risen to three, the Palestinian news agency Wafa has reported, citing Wissam Bakr, director of Jenin Governmental hospital.
The drone fired at least two projectiles, Wafa reported, citing sources in the camp.
Reuters is reporting that US intelligence officials have “high confidence” that an explosion at a Gaza hospital last week was caused by a Palestinian rocket that broke up mid-flight, and not by Israel.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said 471 people were killed in the blast at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital on 17 October. Hamas said an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital, while Israel said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian militant Islamic Jihad group, which has denied responsibility.
The Reuters report was based on testimony from an unnamed official and other US media reports.
The officials said there was still uncertainty around the death toll and the number of injuries, according to the New York Times. The officials also said there was little damage to the hospital and the structure did not collapse, the newspaper reported.
The intelligence assessment was based on Israeli intercepts of Palestinian groups, publicly available video, communications intercepts provided by the Israelis and images of the blast and the aftermath, the officials told the newspaper.
British families of those being held hostage by Hamas are continuing to hold out hope after the release of two further captives.
British psychotherapist Noam Sagi, whose elderly mother Ada is being held hostage by Hamas, said the release of the two elderly hostages on Monday had offered “some hope” for the future.
Downing Street on Tuesday said that at least 12 British nationals were killed in Hamas’s attack on Israel and a further five are still missing, with some of them believed to have been kidnapped. The UK Foreign Office said that officials were working “tirelessly” to save them.
“We will continue to work tirelessly with Qatar, Israel and others to ensure all hostages come home safely,” a Foreign Office spokesperson said according to PA Media.
It comes as UK foreign secretary James Cleverly said he met with some of those whose family members were killed or are still missing.
Israel’s military has dropped leaflets in Gaza, offering protection and a reward to Palestinians who contact them with information about hostages held by Hamas, in its latest effort to free more than 200 people seized during the terrorist attacks that killed 1,400 people on 7 October.
The move underlines the difficulties facing the Israeli government as it tries to reconcile its stated aim to “crush Hamas” with saving the lives of as many hostages as possible.
So far, four female hostages have been released after negotiations brokered by Qatar, which is also believed to be trying to reach a deal in which 50 more dual nationals held by Hamas would be released.
The Israeli military is using surveillance, special forces raids and interrogation of captured members of Hamas to draw up a picture of where the captives – including infants, children and elderly civilians as well male and female soldiers – are being held.
The leaflets will complement this effort but also seek to sow uncertainty among Hamas supporters about who might have accepted the Israeli offer. Many were torn up immediately by residents in Gaza, witnesses reported.
As the death toll from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza rises, the Associated Press has sent this report from inside the enclave:
Across central and south Gaza, where Israel told civilians to take shelter, there were multiple scenes of rescuers pulling the dead and wounded out of large piles of rubble from collapsed buildings.
Graphic photos and video shot by the AP showed rescuers unearthing bodies of children from multiple ruins.
A father knelt on the floor of the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah next to the bodies of three dead children cocooned in bloodied sheets. Later at the nearby morgue, workers prayed over 24 dead wrapped in body bags, several of them the size of small children.
Buildings that collapsed on residents killed dozens at a time in several cases, witnesses said. Two families lost a total 47 members in a leveled home in Rafah, the Health Ministry said.
A strike on a four-story building in Khan Younis killed at least 32 people, including 13 members of the Saqallah family, said Ammar al-Butta, a relative who survived the airstrike. He said there were about 100 people sheltering in the building, including many who had evacuated from Gaza City.
“We thought that our area would be safe,” he said.
Another strike destroyed a bustling marketplace in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, witnesses said. AP photos showed the floor of a vegetable shop covered with blood.
In Gaza City, at least 19 people were killed when an airstrike hit the house of the Bahloul family, according to survivors, who said dozens more people remained buried.
The legs of a dead woman and another person, both still half buried, dangled out of the wreckage where workers dug through the dirt, concrete and rebar.
The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has backed academics and peace activists in his home country in an attack on the “indifference” of some American and European progressives to Hamas atrocities, accusing them of “extreme moral insensitivity” and betraying leftwing politics.
Harari – the author of bestselling books including Sapiens and Homo Deus – joined 90 signatories of a statement expressing dismay with “elements within the global left … until now, our political partners” who had, on occasion, “justified Hamas’s actions”.
The 47-year-old, who has recently become a high-profile political activist in Israel, opposing Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing populist coalition and its plan to weaken judicial oversight, told the Guardian he intervened after speaking with peace activists in his home country who were “completely devastated” and “feeling abandoned and betrayed by supposed allies” in peace efforts, after academics, artists and intellectuals signed letters which failed to condemn Hamas.
Speaking about the reaction from parts of the left in the US and Europe while on a visit to London, Harari said it was “shocking to hear some of the responses that did not only not condemn Hamas, but placed all responsibility on Israel” and to see “the lack of solidarity with regard to the horrific attacks on Israeli civilians”.
Two Palestinians killed in Israeli raid and drone strike in West Bank, medics say
Israeli forces on an overnight raid in the occupied West Bank came under fire by a group of Palestinians whom the military then targeted with a drone strike, the Israeli military said on Wednesday, and medics said two Palestinians were killed. Reuters reports:
The military said armed Palestinians “fired and hurled explosive devices” at its forces in Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank. The military then struck them with a drone, and “hits were identified”, it added.
The Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said two Palestinians were killed, with others injured.
The strike was at least the third use of Israeli air power in the West Bank since violence in the territory surged after Hamas’ Oct. 7 gun rampage in southern Israel.
Jenin refugee camp, a Palestinian militant stronghold, was the focus of a major Israeli military operation earlier this year.
As we look for more details of what’s happening in the city of Jenin right now, here are some of the most recent images that have come to us from the West Bank.
UN secretary general calls for immediate ceasefire in Gaza to end 'epic suffering'
The United Nations’ secretary general has called for an immediate ceasefire to end “epic suffering” in the Gaza Strip after Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed more than 700 people in a single day and hospitals began to shut down for lack of fuel.
António Guterres said the bombardment and blockade of Gaza amounted to the “collective punishment of the Palestinian people” and violated international law, comments that sparked a fierce row with Israel.
“To ease epic suffering, make the delivery of aid easier and safer and facilitate the release of hostages. I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” he said.
Guterres said the 7 October attacks by Hamas were “appalling” but did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” he said. “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
Israel’s envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign immediately, accusing him of being detached from reality. “His comments … constitute a justification for terrorism and murder. It’s sad that a person with such views is the head of an organisation that arose after the Holocaust.”
Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, cancelled a planned meeting with Gutteres.
Here’s our full report on the day’s events:
Israel carries out drone strike on West Bank city of Jenin
Israel’s military has carried out a drone strike on the West Bank city of Jenin during clashes with armed Palestinians, the Israel Defence Forces has said, according to Reuters.
We’ll bring you more on that when we have more detail.
More than 90 people are reported to have been killed and 1,200 arrested by Israeli forces in the West Bank since 7 October, Bethan McKernan and Sufian Taha reported, amid fears that the occupied Palestinian territory could erupt in a fresh wave of even more violence.
At least eight Palestinian communities have been forced to leave their land in the face of escalating violence from Israeli settlers. In Wadi as-Seeq, near Ramallah, soldiers and settlers detained three Palestinians, stripping them to their underwear before beating them, urinating on them, extinguishing cigarettes on them, and sexually assaulting them. The IDF has opened an investigation.
Here’s a taste from Bethan and Sufian’s report:
In their uncle’s house, next door to the ruins of their demolished home, two young boys from Aqbat Jaber refugee camp in the occupied West Bank were still asleep at midmorning.
A few nights ago, their own bedroom was blown up during an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) operation in the camp on the outskirts of Jericho: it was targeted because the boys’ father, Maher Shalon, has been arrested on suspicion of killing an Israeli settler. A 17-year-old Palestinian was killed during the raid on Friday, six people injured, and two arrested.
After the family home was destroyed, the boys’ mother took their older brother to Bethlehem for medical treatment. The younger children are now being cared for by their uncle, Mansour, and their paternal grandmother, Hamda. According to them, the boys have not gone outside since.
“The Israelis are coming almost every day since 7 October,” said Mansour, 56, referring to the date the Palestinian militant group Hamas broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip, massacring 1,400 Israelis and sparking a new war in which more than 5,700 Palestinians in the coastal exclave have been killed.
Australia has called for humanitarian pauses in hostilities and said “the way Israel exercises its right to defend itself matters,” in a statement by foreign minister Penny Wong. She said:
Innocent Palestinian civilians should not suffer because of the outrages perpetrated by Hamas.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people and undermines the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.
She said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “dire” and called for “safe, unimpeded and sustained humanitarian access, and safe passage for civilians,” saying the access allowed in recent days was “nowhere near enough”.
She continued:
The way Israel exercises its right to defend itself matters. It matters to civilians throughout the region, and it matters to Israel’s ongoing security.
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