Israel strikes Gaza after UN calls for more aid but not cease-fire
Palestinians wept and prayed for their dead on Saturday after fresh Israeli strikes followed a UN Security Council resolution that demanded more aid be allowed into Gaza but did not call for an immediate halt to fighting.
Clouds of grey and black smoke rose over Khan Yunis city in the south after strikes in the morning, and live AFPTV images showed black smoke drifting over the territory’s north.
The health ministry in the Gaza Strip reported 18 people killed in a strike on a house at the central Nuseirat refugee camp, and said other targets were hit up and down the Gaza Strip.
The bombardments came after the Security Council approved a resolution demanding “immediate, safe and unhindered” deliveries of life-saving aid be rushed to Gaza “at scale”.
It also called for creation of “conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities,” but did not seek an immediate end to combat.
Members had wrangled for days over the wording.
At Washington’s insistence, they toned down some provisions and avoided calling for a cease-fire that would stop the Israel’s attacks, which began with unprecedented attacks 11 weeks ago by Hamas resistance group against Israel.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said a “humanitarian cease-fire” is the only way for aid “to be effectively delivered”.
The issue is not the number of aid trucks, he said, but “the way Israel is conducting this offensive is creating massive obstacles” to aid distribution. Guterres also has paid tribute to staff of the United Nations who have been killed in Gaza.
“136 of our colleagues in Gaza have been killed in 75 days — something we have never seen in UN history,” Guterres wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday. “Most of our staff have been forced from their homes.”
The health ministry in Gaza also said on Saturday dozens of Palestinians were killed this week and publicly “executed” during an Israeli military operation in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli “massacre resulted in the death of dozens” of people in the Jabalia camp and Jabalia town, ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement.
“They also executed dozens of citizens in the streets,” he added. According to videos broadcast by local media, decomposing bodies were seen strewn on the streets of Jabalia. In Beit Lahia, a city in the north of the Gaza Strip, the civil defense authority said it had found on Saturday “dozens of decomposing bodies”.
“Most of the bodies recovered in Beit Lahia were executed in the streets and mauled by dogs,” it said.
On Wednesday, the United Nations human rights office said it received “disturbing” reports that Israeli troops “summarily killed” at least 11 unarmed Palestinians in a possible war crime in Gaza. The killings were alleged to have been carried out in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City this week, it added.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, rejected the allegations as “yet another example of the partisan and prejudiced approach against Israel” by the UN body.
The UN estimates the war has displaced 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million population.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a majority of those uprooted from their homes were now going “entire days and nights without eating”, and “famine is looming”.