Famine approaches slowly for Gazans, who spend hours in queues for a few ladles of cooked food and the chance to fill plastic containers with drinkable water after nearly nine months of Israel’s military campaign in the enclave.
Sometimes there is nothing to queue for in the shattered streets and crowded schools that have been turned into shelters for the vast majority of Palestininans displaced by bombardment.
“We found no water, food or drink as you can see. We walk long distances to search for water that is not even available,” said Abdel Rahman Khadourah, looking for somewhere to get water in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Despite concerted international efforts, the global hunger monitor said this week that Gaza remains at high risk of famine, with about a fifth of the territory’s population still facing “catastrophic” food insecurity.
On Wednesday Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza said a child had died from malnutrition and dehydration.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said that only a fraction of their health centres are operational in Gaza,
According to a post on their X account, the UN agency said their teams in Nuseirat were serving families, but a severe shortage of medicine and fuel was hampering lifesaving operations.
“Safe and sustained aid access can’t wait any longer,” it said.
The majority of people in Gaza City’s Shujayea and Tuffa neighbourhoods — located in the eastern part of the city — are displaced Palestinians, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports from Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.
They have found themselves in another dilemma, pushed to move west after the Israeli military issued sharp evacuation orders, sending text messages and dropping leaflets. Those orders came around 30 minutes into the military’s operations in the area.
People are being forced into internal displacement over and over. It is becoming part of their daily routine, a new normal.
Some families are still trapped in areas under evacuation orders, given the dense presence of quadcopters, surveillance drones and heavy artillery. The operation continues.
There is little Gaza’s doctors can do to alleviate the pain that three-year-old Suhaib Khuzaiq still feels from a shrapnel injury that caused his leg to be amputated above the knee in December.
“He is in pain and in need of painkillers and a prosthetic limb that is only available outside Gaza”, his father Ali Khuzaiq, 31, told AFP from Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital where Suhaib receives treatment.
On December 6, an Israeli air strike on their neighbourhood of Tal Al-Hawa, southwest of Gaza City, injured Suhaib and destroyed their home, displacing the family who are now staying with relatives, Khuzaiq said.
The offensive and Israel’s blockade have caused a shortage of medicines and destroyed much of Gaza’s medical capacity.
As a result, amputations have become a key way of handling injuries that in other circumstances might have been treated differently, causing their number to soar further.
Citing data from Unicef, the chief of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Wednesday that in Gaza “every day 10 children… are losing one leg or two legs on average,” adding that it meant “around 2,000 children” had lost legs since the start of the offensive.
Unicef’s spokesman Jonathan Crickx later told AFP that difficulties in gathering data in a conflict zone meant the figures were only “estimates” that would take time to verify, but that the agency “has met many children who have lost limbs”.
The health ministry in Gaza has said that at least 37,765 people have been killed during more than eight months of Israeli bombardment, AFP reports.
The toll includes at least 47 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 86,429 people had been wounded in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
The Israeli military said a soldier was killed and another seriously wounded in an operation in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, the latest violence in the Palestinian territory, AFP reports.
Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported that a young Palestinian man was wounded in the face by shrapnel during the latest military raid.
Captain Alon Sacgiu, 22, “fell during an operation in the Jenin sector”, the military said in a brief statement, without giving details of the circumstances of his death.
Another soldier was seriously wounded and taken to hospital, the military said.
Wafa said Israeli troops stormed Jenin shortly before midnight and were deployed until dawn in the city and its outskirts.
Troops “deployed dozens of sniper soldiers on the roofs of commercial buildings and houses and in the neighbourhoods of the city and its commercial centre,” the Palestinian agency reported on its English language website.
When contacted by AFP, the Israeli military said it had withdrawn from Jenin but gave no further details of its operation.
Another child died of malnutrition in northern Gaza overnight and six people were killed and several wounded in renewed Israeli bombing of residential areas of Gaza City, Palestinian health officials have said, Reuters reports.
In the southern city of Rafah, a one-time place of refuge where Israel says it is close to completing an almost month-long operation against Hamas fighters, residents said the military had flattened several districts over the past few days.
“We are being starved in Gaza City, and are being hunted by tanks and planes with no hope that this war is ever ending,” Mohammad Jamal, 25, a resident of Gaza City, told Reuters via a chat app.
The death of another girl in Kamal Adwan Hospital late on Wednesday raised the number of children who have died of malnutrition and dehydration to at least 31, a health official said, adding that the war made recording such cases difficult.
Israel denies accusations it has created the famine conditions, blaming aid agencies for distribution problems and accusing Hamas of diverting aid, allegations the militants deny.
Israeli forces have hit a house with artillery fire near Bureij camp in central Gaza, killing at least one person and injuring others, Al Jazeera staffers on the ground report.
It comes after a spate of overnight attacks we reported in northern Gaza killed nine people, AJ highlighted.
Tensions between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah seem to be escalating as Israel’s offensive on Gaza nears nine months.
An Al Jazeerareport quotes the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) as saying that Israel, Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon exchanged at least 7,400 attacks across the border from Oct 7, 2023, to June 21, 2024.
Israel conducted about 83 per cent of these attacks, totalling 6,142 incidents, killing at least 543 people in Lebanon.
Hezbollah and other armed groups were responsible for 1,258 attacks that killed at least 21 Israelis.
Israeli forces have arrested 28 people in the latest raids in occupied West Bank raids, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, which keeps a daily tally.
The majority of the arrests since last night took place in Jenin governorate, while the rest were in the governorates of Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus and Jerusalem, Al Jazeeraquotes the PPS as saying.
Among those apprehended were a female student and numerous former detainees. During the raids, Israeli forces doled out “severe beatings” and made threats against detainees’ families, the group added.
The Israeli military has said that its fighter jets attacked the Al Hasna school in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, Al Jazeerareports.
The military did not say if there were casualties resulting from the attack, but claimed “precise weaponry” was used.
“The school served as the headquarters of the terrorist organisation Hamas,” the military wrote in a post on X, without providing any evidence to support its allegations, according to AJ.
Two people have been killed in an Israeli strike on southern Syria, the official Sana news agency reported, citing a military source.
According to the NGO Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the strike targeted the service centre of a foundation affiliated with pro-Iranian groups including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The strike was near Sayyida Zeinab, which is home to an important Shia sanctuary and is defended by pro-Iranian militias and the army.
“At around 11:40pm, the Israeli enemy carried out an aerial assault from the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a number of positions in the southern region, killing two people and injuring a soldier,” the Sana report said.
It said Syrian air defence had also shot down some missiles, without giving further details. The Observatory, however, said that three people were killed in the strike, including an elderly woman, with another 11 injured. It had initially reported one death.
Patients in Gaza’s few standing hospitals are dying in droves from infections resulting from a lack of protective gear and soap, even when they survive their horrific blast injuries, AFP reports.
And health workers are facing agonising decisions, like giving up on a seven-year-old boy with extensive burns because bandages are in short supply and he’d have probably died anyway.
These are just some of the horrors witnessed by American doctors and nurses returning from the besieged Palestinian territory, who are now on a mission to spread the word about what they saw and apply pressure on Israel to allow in more life-saving supplies.
“Whether or not a ceasefire happens, we have to get humanitarian aid. And we have to get it in sufficient volumes to meet the demands, “Adam Hamawy, a former US army combat surgeon, tells AFP in an interview after a medical mission to Gaza’s European Hospital last month.
“You could give all you want, you can donate,” says the reconstructive plastic surgeon from New Jersey. “But if these borders don’t open up to allow that aid to get in, then it’s just useless.”
Hamawy has volunteered in war-torn and natural disaster-hit countries for the past 30 years, from the siege of Sarajevo to the Haiti earthquake.
“But the level of civilian casualties that I experienced was beyond anything I’d seen before,” says the 54-year-old.
Palestinian boys sit by their belongings on a damaged walkway on a road at al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on June 26, 2024. — AFP
Israel and the United States have said they had made progress toward resolving a rift over US weapons shipments after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused President Joe Biden’s administration of slowing down deliveries, AFP reports.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant met top officials over three days in Washington as he voiced hope for quietly working through disagreements with Israel’s vital ally, drawing an implicit contrast to Netanyahu’s more confrontational approach.
“During the meetings we made significant progress, obstacles were removed and bottlenecks were addressed,” Gallant said after meeting with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor.
Gallant said the progress was on “a variety of issues” including “the topic of force build-up and munition supply that we must bring to the state of Israel”. “I would like to thank the US administration and the American public for their enduring support for the state of Israel,” he said.
The United States in early May froze a shipment that included 2,000-pound bombs and Biden warned of a further halt as he pressed Israel not to carry out a wide-scale military assault of Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than one million displaced Palestinians had sought shelter.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said during a visit to Washington that his country did not want war in Lebanon, but could send it back to the “Stone Age” if diplomacy failed, AFP reports.
“We don’t want to get into a war because it’s not good for Israel. We have the ability to take Lebanon back to the Stone Age, but we don’t want to do it,” Gallant told reporters on the last day of the visit.
“We do not want war, but we are preparing for every scenario,” he said.
“Hezbollah understands very well that we can inflict massive damage in Lebanon if a war is launched.”
Fears of an all-out war in Lebanon have risen in recent weeks as violent exchanges between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group have intensified.
Gallant said Wednesday that Israel had killed more than 400 Hezbollah “terrorists” in recent months. According to an AFP tally, at least 481 people have died in Lebanon as a result of the Israel-Hezbollah clashes since October 7, including 94 civilians.
A Lebanese civil defence member inspects the site of an Israeli airstrike on the southern village of Khiam near the Lebanese border with northern Israeli on June 26, 2024. — AFP
US President Joe Biden’s top aides have told the visiting Israeli defence chief that Washington is maintaining a pause on a shipment of heavy bombs for Israel while the issue is under review, a senior US official said, Reuters reports.
The official, briefing reporters about national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s meeting with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, said the allies remain in discussions about the single shipment of powerful munitions, which Biden paused in May over concerns they could cause more Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza.
Without providing specifics, the official said other US weapons will continue to flow to Israel as it battles Hamas in Gaza and faces Hezbollah on its northern border, where escalating hostilities have spurred fears of a wider regional conflict.
“We are in discussions ultimately to find a resolution,” the senior U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. “But I think the president has expressed his concerns about that one shipment, and those are very valid concerns.”
The official acknowledged there have been bottlenecks in some weapons deliveries to Israel but attributed that to a complicated bureaucratic system for approving military assistance and not any deliberate slowdown.
Only 1,000 tonnes of the 7,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid shipped to Gaza from Cyprus have been distributed because of insecurity, US aid officials said, AFP reports.
The remaining 6,000 tonnes were on shore in secure conditions but have yet to be distributed because of an upsurge in violence and looting, officials said.
The maritime aid route has faced obstacles, including security concerns at a US military-built pier and the distribution of aid upon arrival.
“I have never seen a more challenging or complex environment for the humanitarian community to work,” said USAID’s Doug Stropes. “There is currently a security review on the lawlessness and gang activity,” he said, referring to information received from partners on the ground.
Cyprus Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said that despite the challenges, the aid effort to Gaza would continue.
“There is a constant flow of vessels and sending to the other side,” he said. “There are of course certain challenges, challenges that relate to everything going on in Gaza, but we continue the effort.
“It is not going to be an easy task. We are, after all, operating in what is a war zone and we are doing everything we can in cooperation with our partners to ensure that this has an impact on the daily lives of people on the ground.”
Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has told reporters that Israeli forces could send Lebanon “back to the stone age” if fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalates, Al Jazeera reports.
“We do not want war, but we are preparing for every scenario,” he said.
Gallant was wrapping up a four-day visit to the United States, where he says he made progress securing support from the Biden administration for Israel’s “force build-up” and weapons supply.
The AFP office in Gaza — which was badly damaged by a strike in November — was “probably hit by Israeli tank fire”, the French news agency said in a post on X.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry has condemned a recent social media post by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, calling it an attempt to cover up Israel’s crimes, Al Jazeera reports.
“We consider the disrespectful post by the Israeli foreign minister targeting our esteemed president as a tone that can only be adopted by an official of a state accused of genocide,” said a ministry statement.
It emphasised that such accusations are part of Israel’s efforts to obscure its own criminal actions.
Criticising the social media post, the ministry said: “Such slander and lies are part of Israel’s efforts to cover up the crimes it has committed.”
Turkey will continue to fight for peace and justice, it said.
European Union Representative Josep Borell said he and Lebanese Foreign Minister Bou Habib discussed ways to ensure there is an “immediate de-escalation” across the Blue Line — the border demarcation between Lebanon and Israel, Al Jazeera reports.
In a meeting on Wednesday, he also indicated they would ramp up efforts to find a political solution to lessen tensions.
“Lebanon, Israel and the region cannot afford another war. The EU would be affected too,” he posted on X.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said he achieved “significant progress” in addressing Israel’s concerns about the flow of US weapons after talks with top officials in Washington, AFP reports.
“During the meetings, we made significant progress, obstacles were removed and bottlenecks were addressed,” he said.
Gallant said the progress was on “a variety of issues” including “the topic of force build-up and munition supply that we must bring to the state of Israel.”
“I would like to thank the US administration and the American public for their enduring support for the state of Israel,” he said.
Gallant did not elaborate on the progress and whether the Biden administration agreed to push forward weapons or if it made reassuring explanations.
But on his trip, Gallant has repeatedly distanced himself from Netanyahu’s confrontational approach and vowed to work through differences with the United States, Israel’s vital military and diplomatic ally.
A US aid official has said thousands of tonnes of food, medicines and other aid piled up on a Gaza beach are not reaching those in need because of a dire security situation on the ground, Al Jazeera reports.
Doug Stropes of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) explained Gaza continues to be an active combat zone with a “general sense of lawlessness”.
According to Stropes, truck drivers trying to deliver via a US-built pier are either getting shot at or having their cargo seized by “gang-like” groups.
The looting “appeared to have expanded beyond just self-distribution”, he said.
“It expanded recently beyond just those in need stopping the vehicles and getting the assistance out, and it appears to be organised — not in the sense of a large-scale organisation, but there are organised elements that are stopping and taking the commodities from the trucks.”
The UN humanitarian chief voiced alarm at the prospect of Israel’s bombardment against Hamas in Gaza spreading to Lebanon, warning that it was “potentially apocalyptic”, AFP reports.
“I see it as the flashpoint […] It’s potentially apocalyptic,” Martin Griffiths, whose term finishes at the end of the month, told reporters in Geneva.
Sweltering summer weather is worsening conditions in Gaza where nearly all the 2.3 million inhabitants have been driven from their homes by Israel’s military campaign and where there is almost no electricity and little clean water, Reuters reports.
Families living in tents, in crowded shelters in UN schools or crammed into private homes, face the rising summer temperatures without air condition, showers or a functioning health system amid rising rates of malnutrition and disease.
In a school classroom shared as a shelter among different families in Khan Younis in southern Gaza Strip, Amal Nsair, 38, is worried that the rising heat and humidity and the increase in mosquitoes and other insects will harm their health.
Her son cannot sleep and she has nothing to cool him except a fan made from cardboard. The family’s home was in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza Strip, which they fled earlier in the conflict.
“My son’s body is full of heat. In the past I would wash him but I need water. I’m very worried about my husband’s health too. He has lost half his weight from carrying water,” she said.
