Deaths among Gazan children likely to rise ‘rapidly’ amid aid crunch, UN warns
Days after an aid delivery in Gaza turned into a deadly disaster, Israel pressed ahead on Sunday with a new convoy headed to northern Gaza, a Palestinian businessman involved in the initiative said, as the United Nations warned that the deaths of children and infants will likely result in “rapid increase” if food and medical supplies are not delivered immediately.
Izzat Aqel, the businessman, said the renewed delivery of aid on Sunday came after only one of at least 16 trucks carrying supplies north had reached Gaza City a day earlier. The rest, he said, had been surrounded by desperate Gazans and emptied in the Nuseirat neighborhood of central Gaza.
COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries to Gaza, said on Sunday on X that 277 trucks entered Gaza, which the agency said was the highest number of trucks entering the enclave in a single day since the start of the war. It was unclear how many of those trucks reached northern Gaza.
Delivering supplies to Gaza, especially in the north, has become increasingly urgent in recent days as the United Nations has warned that many Gazans are on the brink of famine.
Israeli officials have worked with several Gaza businessmen in recent days to organize private aid convoys. But a convoy that arrived in Gaza City before dawn on Thursday ended in destruction. More than a hundred Palestinians were killed after many thousands of people gathered around trucks loaded with food and supplies, Gaza health officials said.
Israeli and Palestinian officials and witnesses offered widely varying accounts of the chaos. Witnesses described extensive shootings by Israeli forces, and doctors at hospitals in Gaza said most of the casualties were the result of gunfire. The Israeli army said most of the victims were trampled in a crowd of people trying to seize the cargo, although Israeli officials acknowledged that troops had opened fire on members of the crowd who, the army said, “were acting in a manner had been approached that put them in danger’. .”
The agreement between Palestinian businessmen and the Israeli army to send convoys to Gaza came after the World Food Program and UNRWA said they were no longer able to deliver aid to the north, citing civilian efforts to rush aid trucks, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of roads damaged during the war. The United States performed its first performance on Saturday airdrop of aidalthough U.S. officials have said such operations cannot move supplies on the same scale as the convoys.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, saying Hamas must agree to the six-week pause currently on the table and Israel must increase the flow of aid to the besieged enclave amid a “humanitarian crisis”. catastrophe.”
Ms. Harris’ comments, delivered in Selma, Ala., reinforced a recent effort by the Biden administration to reach an agreement and came a day before she met with a top Israeli official involved in war planning, raising tensions may increase after President Biden called Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas-led attack is ‘over the top’.
Ms. Harris’ comments were her strongest yet on the conflict in the Middle East, which Gaza health authorities say has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians and pushed the enclave to the brink of famine.
“People in Gaza are starving,” Ms. Harris said. “The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to action.”
She added: “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire,” a sentence that drew loud applause.
Gaza’s health ministry said Sunday that 15 children at the Kamal Adwan hospital in the north have died in recent days from what it described as malnutrition and dehydration. The ministry did not provide further details on the deaths, but said the hospital had run out of oxygen and fuel to power its generators and was barely functioning, with very limited supplies. It added in a statement that the lives of six other children in intensive care were at risk due to malnutrition and dehydration.
Adele Khodr, UNICEF director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement on Sunday that one in six children under the age of two in Gaza is acutely malnourished.
“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and completely preventable,” she said of the deaths reported in Kamal Adwan.
The United Nations and aid agencies say a ceasefire is necessary to reach Gazans isolated by more than four months of fighting.
Talks about a pause in fighting continued in Cairo on Sunday, but a breakthrough did not appear imminent. Hamas sent representatives, but no Israeli officials were present.
Israel decided not to send a delegation to Cairo after Qatar’s prime minister told the head of Israel’s Mossad on Sunday morning that Hamas had rejected an Israeli request to provide a list of the hostages seized during the October 7 invasion and were still alive. an Israeli official familiar with the talks and not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.
Another factor in Israel’s decision was that Hamas refused to agree to the hostage-for-Palestinian prisoner exchange conditions set by the United States. presented in Paris about ten days agosaid two Israeli officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The US plan called for Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 40 hostages, with different numbers of prisoners traded for different categories of hostages, according to two officials with knowledge of the negotiations.
Basem Naim, a Hamas official, declined to comment on claims about the group’s denials.
The United States has pushed for a ceasefire ahead of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that starts in about a week, but progress in talks has been slow.
In a measure of the desperation in Gaza, Palestinians continued to gather this weekend at the same spot on the coast where Thursday’s deadly incident unfolded, hoping for more aid to arrive.
“Even after the massacre, people still go to Al-Rashid Street every day and will continue to do so until they secure some help,” said Ghada Ikrayyem, 23, a resident of North Gaza. “We expected people to be scared after what happened on Thursday, but we were surprised to see even more people going there.”
Ms Ikrayyem’s brother Muhammed, 30, who is deaf and mute, slept on the beach for three days waiting for emergency vehicles to arrive, she said. After dodging the bullets on Thursday, he managed to get home with a 25 kilogram bag of flour, which was now being rationed and mixed with animal feed to make it last as long as possible by fifty members of his family who had found shelter together to go.
“He came home terrified, he saw dead bodies everywhere,” Ms. Ikrayyem said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Despite narrowly avoiding death on Thursday, Muhammed has returned to the same spot every day since, hoping to get another bag of flour, she added.
The threat of famine comes as fighting continues in Gaza, especially in the south.
An Israeli attack on Saturday outside a hospital in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, killed at least 11 people and injured dozens of other displaced Palestinians, including children, who were sheltering in nearby tents, the Health Ministry said of Gaza.
At least two health workers, including a paramedic, were among those killed after the strike at the gate of the Emirates maternity hospital, the Health Ministry said.
Photos taken by news agencies showed colleagues of the paramedic, identified by the Health Ministry as Abdul Fattah Abu Marai, taking his body to the nearby Kuwaiti hospital, as well as injured children lying on stretchers as other children watched and cried .
The Israeli military said later Saturday that it had carried out a “precision strike” on “Islamic Jihad terrorists” near the hospital, with the help of Israel’s Internal Security Service. The army declined to comment on reports that children had been injured in the attack.
More than 21 weeks after fighting began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, which Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people, the consequences of the war continue to ripple through the region.
On Saturday, a British cargo ship, the Rubymar, sank in the Red Sea about two weeks after it was damaged in a missile attack by the Iran-backed Houthi militia, which says it is attacking ships in an effort to pressure Israel. to end the military siege of Gaza.
The US Army Central Command confirmed the sinking of the Rubymar rack on social media. It said the ship sank early Saturday with a cargo of 21,000 tons of ammonium phosphate sulfate fertilizer that now “poses an environmental risk in the Red Sea.”
Erica L. Greencontributed reporting from Selma, Ala., andAnushka Patil also contributed.