The UN agency for Palestinian refugees could cease its activities on Wednesday for lack of fuel in the Gaza Strip, besieged and shelled relentlessly by the Israeli army in response to the bloody Hamas attack.
The international aid that is starting to arrive in the Palestinian territory represents only “a drop in an ocean of needs”, launched Tuesday the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres.
He called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and condemned “clear violations of humanitarian law” in the Palestinian territory, angering Israel.
The attack carried out by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the reprisals carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip have so far left more than 1,400 dead in Israel, according to the authorities, and more than 6,500 in the Palestinian territory. , according to the Islamist movement, mainly civilians on both sides.
According to the World Health Organization, six hospitals have closed due to lack of fuel in the Gaza Strip, where 2.4 million Palestinians are crowded together in disastrous humanitarian conditions.
The UN is urgently calling for the delivery of fuel, to run the generators in hospitals where thousands of injured people are flocking, to pump and purify water and to keep trucks moving.
Operations without anesthesia
“We operated on several injured people without anesthesia,” Ahmad Abdul Hadi, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip, told an AFP journalist.
“First, there are not enough anesthetics in the hospital. Then the injured suffer greatly, we cannot wait so we operate on them,” he added.
According to Mohammed Abu Selmeya, the director of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest in the territory, “ten hospitals are already out of service” and “more than 90% of medicines and products are exhausted.”
But for the United States, a ceasefire “at this stage would only benefit Hamas.” The White House instead suggested “pauses” to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.
The Gaza Strip, a poor territory of 362 square kilometers, subject to an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since Hamas took power there in 2007, has been placed under “complete siege” by Israel since October 9. , which cut off water, electricity and food supplies there.
“Large strikes”
This siege is accompanied by relentless bombardment of the territory by Israel, which has massed tens of thousands of soldiers on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip and intensified its strikes in recent days with the aim of “crushing” Hamas.
A ground offensive would, however, be extremely dangerous in this very densely populated territory, riddled with tunnels where Hamas hides weapons and fighters, and in the presence of hostages.
“There are a lot of obstacles,” an Israeli soldier from an engineering unit told AFP, without giving his name. “The enemy is spraying us with rockets and other things that I cannot detail, to prevent us from progressing.”
The Hamas government in Gaza announced Wednesday that bombings had killed at least 80 people in the Palestinian territory overnight.
The Israeli army claimed to have carried out “large-scale strikes”, which hit “several Hamas terrorist infrastructures”, including tunnels.
On October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest, and on the last day of the Sukkot holiday, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, sowing terror during this violent and devastating attack. an unprecedented scale since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
More than 1,400 people have died in Israel since the start of the war, most of them civilians killed on the day of the attack, according to authorities.
Around 220 Israeli, foreign or binational hostages were identified by Israel, taken to Gaza by Hamas. Four of them were released.
On Wednesday, Hamas claimed that 6,546 people, mostly civilians including 2,704 children, had been killed by Israeli retaliatory bombings, which destroyed entire buildings and caused massive population displacement.
” Hurry up “
On Tuesday, a fourth convoy of eight trucks loaded with water, food and medicine, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, arrived from Egypt via the Rafah border post, the only crossing point into the Strip. Gaza which is not under Israeli control.
In total, a few dozen trucks have arrived since October 21 when, according to the UN, at least a hundred trucks per day would be needed.
” Hurry up. We urgently need fuel,” Juliette Touma, communications director for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, who fears having to stop its operations as of Wednesday evening, told AFP.
But Israel rules out letting in fuel, saying it would benefit Hamas and its military operations.
Since October 15, the Israeli army has called on the population of the northern Gaza Strip, where the bombardments are the most intense, to evacuate to the south.
But the strikes also continue to affect this part of the territory, close to the Egyptian border, where several hundred thousand civilians are massed.
In total, at least 1.4 million Palestinians have fled their homes since the start of the war, according to the UN.
“At midnight, while we were sleeping, we felt fragments and stones falling on us,” said Amine Abu Jazar, a man taking refuge in Rafah, on Wednesday.
” It’s a tragedy. We don’t even have enough electricity to see each other, the dead and the injured. Where is UNRWA? Where are the United Nations and the whole world? “, he said.
Strikes against Syria
Faced with a risk of the conflict extending to other countries in the Middle East, French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called on Iran, a powerful supporter of Hamas, and its regional allies, Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, to “not take the risk of opening new fronts”.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority, accused the United States on Wednesday of “somehow directing” Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip.
After a visit to support Israel and then Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank, Mr. Macron met King Abdullah II of Jordan in Amman on Wednesday, before going to Cairo for a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi .
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan canceled on Wednesday any planned visit to Israel, where he accused the army of behaving with “inhumanity”.
The Israeli army announced on Wednesday that it had struck military infrastructure in Syria in response to fire towards its territory. Eight Syrian soldiers were killed, according to state Syrian media.
The Israeli air force also carried out a raid on Wednesday against the airport of Aleppo, in northern Syria.
Tension is also very high in the occupied West Bank where more than a hundred Palestinians have been killed in violence since October 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as well as on Israel’s border with Lebanon, where exchanges of There are daily shootings between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas.