Key points
- The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees has denounced the killing of civilians in northern Gaza.
- The UN called for a temporary truce to allow civilians to leave the north, citing dire humanitarian conditions.
- Health workers have said they are running out of medical supplies and that hospitals are unable to treat many of the injured.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees called for a temporary truce to allow people to leave areas of northern Gaza as health officials said they were running out of supplies to treat patients wounded in a three-week Israeli attack .
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UNRWA relief agency, said the humanitarian situation had reached a critical point, with bodies abandoned on roadsides or buried under rubble.
“In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die,” he said overnight in a statement on the social media platform X. “They feel abandoned, hopeless and alone.”
“I call for an immediate truce, even if for a few hours, to allow safe humanitarian passage for families who wish to leave the area and reach safer places,” he said.
The United States has asked Israel to allow more humanitarian supplies into northern Gaza and Israel says aid has been delivered in dozens of trucks and airdrops, but doctors in Gaza say the aid has not reached them.
Israel’s military humanitarian unit, COGAT, which oversees aid and commercial shipments to Gaza, said Tuesday that 237 trucks containing humanitarian aid, including food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment, came from Jordan and the international community , were transferred to northern Gaza. Undress within the last eight days.
This breakthrough in Israel’s blockade followed US threats to potentially cut off arms exports if the aid situation did not improve.
On Tuesday, health officials in Gaza said more than 70 people had been killed by Israeli forces. They said at least 57 of them were killed in the northern Gaza Strip. The bodies of dozens of people were on roadsides and under rubble, inaccessible to rescue teams due to the ongoing attacks.
“Many wounded died before our eyes and we could do nothing for them,” said Munir Al-Bursh, director of Gaza’s health ministry, who is currently based in northern Gaza.
“Hospitals have also run out of coffins to prepare the dead and we have asked people to donate any tissue they have at home.”
The Israeli army, which this month launched an assault on Hamas militants holding out in the northern town of Jabalia, says it is evacuating people along designated routes and has filtered scores of militants from civilians heading south.
Israeli drones circled overhead, urging Palestinians to evacuate areas around the town of Beit Lahiya, just north of Jabalia.
An Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahiya on Saturday leveled a residential block, with at least 87 people killed or missing under the rubble, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
Many Palestinians fear the evacuation orders are part of an Israeli plan to liberate the area to create a buffer zone that will allow Israel to control Gaza after the war.
The Israeli military denies that the evacuations are part of a larger plan, saying it is moving people to separate them from Hamas fighters.
‘Important opportunity’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday urged Israeli leaders to work towards a ceasefire in Gaza.
Blinken is on his 11th trip to the Middle East since Hamas’s attack on Israel more than a year ago sparked the Gaza war, and his first since the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah it intensified last month.
The top US diplomat told Israeli leaders that the army’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week represented an “opportunity” for a truce and the release of hostages seized by Hamas in the attack of 7 October 2023.
During an earlier meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Blinken pressed for more aid to be given to the besieged Palestinian territory as concerns grow over tens of thousands of civilians trapped by a major Israeli assault in the hard-to-reach north.
A U.S. official said Netanyahu recognized the “seriousness” of Blinken’s warnings to increase aid access to Gaza, “but it is the results that count.”
Washington has warned it may suspend some of its military assistance if Israel does not quickly improve humanitarian access to the area.
