Israeli forces continue bombardment of Gaza as UN aid chief demands access | Gaza News

Israeli forces continued to attack several areas of the besieged Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Palestinians, while residents reported nightly attacks in Rafah, in the south of the enclave.

Israeli strikes in Gaza killed 60 Palestinians and injured 140 in the latest 24-hour reporting period, Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

He said many victims remained trapped under the rubble because ambulances and doctors were unable to reach them.

Residents said fighting intensified in the Tal as-Sultan neighborhood west of Rafah, where tanks were also trying to force their way north amid heavy clashes. The armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad said their fighters attacked Israeli forces with anti-tank rockets and mortars.

Since early May, ground fighting has centered on Rafah, near Egypt at the southern tip of Gaza, where about half of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have taken shelter after fleeing other areas. Since then, most have had to flee again.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said the previous 24 hours had been “violent, bloody and quite brutal for Palestinians in Gaza”.

“There have been more attacks in densely populated areas, whether in the northern part of the Strip, the central Nuseirat area or further south in Gaza, where the Israeli military still operates aggressively, systematically destroying and demolishing homes. houses in the city of Rafah,” said Mahmoud.

Doctors said two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli missile attack in Rafah.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces killed a Hamas fighter and that the jets struck dozens of targets in Rafah overnight, including fighters, military structures and tunnel shafts.

Later on Wednesday, an Israeli strike killed eight Palestinians and injured others near the northern Jabalia camp, one of eight historic refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

In the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, tank shells hit an apartment, killing at least five people and wounding others, doctors said.

More than eight months after Israel’s attack on Gaza, international mediation supported by the US, Qatar and Egypt has failed to produce a ceasefire agreement. Hamas maintains that any agreement must bring an end to the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, while Israel says it will accept only temporary pauses in fighting until Hamas is eradicated.

‘Dehydration and hunger’

In the north of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians complained of a serious lack of food and rising prices. Health officials said thousands of children were suffering from malnutrition, which has killed at least 30 since October 7.

“There is only flour and canned food, there is nothing else to eat, no vegetables, no meat, no milk,” said Abu Mustafa, who lives in Gaza City with his family.

Their home was hit last week by an Israeli tank shell, which destroyed most of the upper floor.

“In addition to the bombing, there is another Israeli war going on in northern Gaza, the famine. People meet on the streets and many cannot recognize each other because of their weight loss and aged appearance,” Abu Mustafa told Reuters news agency.

Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud said that “many parts of Gaza already struggle daily with forced dehydration and starvation.”

“Even if we say… the bomb stops falling, people will die because of the terrible situation in Gaza,” he said.

The Gaza Strip remains at high risk of famine, although the delivery of some aid has limited the projected spread of extreme famine in northern areas, a global monitor said on Tuesday.

More than 495,000 people across the Gaza Strip face the most severe, or “catastrophic,” level of food insecurity, according to an update from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global partnership used by the United Nations. and humanitarian aid agencies.

However, the United Nations aid chief said demands for unimpeded humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip remained in force.

“We want all these crossing points open, we want safety and security protocols, we want conflict resolution we can trust, and we want aid workers and health institutions not to fall victim to war,” said Martin Griffiths, who runs the Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.

He also called for a ceasefire.

Griffiths said he was concerned about the possible spread of the Gaza war throughout the region, including the occupied West Bank.

The West Bank, where the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule under Israeli occupation, has already suffered its worst unrest in decades, in parallel with the attack on Gaza, due to a rise in mass arrests by Israeli forces and an increase in the number of Israeli settlers. violence.

The UN human rights office said 528 Palestinians, including 133 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces or settlers in the West Bank since the attack on Gaza began, and it has “serious concerns about unlawful killings” in some cases.

“We are concerned about the potential for more tragedies and deaths and the developments in the West Bank, as well as, of course, the threats and possibilities [of conflict] in Lebanon,” Griffiths said.

“There is a lot of preparation on the aid side. That’s not the problem,” he said. “The problem is to prevent this war from getting worse and to prevent the people of Palestine from exercising their right to their future. That’s the concern I think we should all have.”