The director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA) yesterday described the city of Gaza as “hell on earth”. “In Gaza the tragedy is getting worse. People are everywhere, they live on the streets, they have nothing. They beg for safety and an end to this hell on earth. We ask the impossible of our colleagues, in this impossible situation,” wrote Philippe Lazzarini on the social network X, after a visit to Palestinian territory.
The statement came on a day when the Israeli army renewed its offensive against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip, where, the UN official stressed, the civilian population is trying to escape the bombs in increasingly desperate humanitarian conditions.
Ground fighting, accompanied by deadly airstrikes, took place yesterday between Israeli soldiers and Islamist fighters in the area of Khan Yunis, the major southern city where hundreds of thousands of civilians have sought refuge after fleeing war in the country’s north. the Palestinian territory.
Forced to flee again, tens of thousands of people are now sheltering in makeshift camps in the nearby town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where food is scarce despite limited distribution of humanitarian aid. “There are more and more people who haven’t eaten for a day, two days, three days? People are missing everything,” Lazzarini said.
In the north of the Gaza Strip, the Hamas Health Ministry said the Israeli army had launched an attack on the Kamal Adwan Hospital after “surrounding and bombarding” it for several days.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, guaranteed that humanitarian aid entering Gaza would increase since yesterday with the opening of a second checkpoint in Kerem Shalom, which will join the only one that existed so far, in Nitzana, also close to the border between Israel, South Gaza and Egypt.
Killed by friendly fire
The Israeli army announced that it had reached a rocket launch site in Jabalia, near the city of Gaza, which fired at Sderot, in southern Israel, and also revealed that it had found hundreds of projectiles and grenade launchers in a Hamas compound.
It went on to say that the Israeli army has so far lost 105 soldiers, 20 of them in accidents – 13 killed by ‘friendly fire’ and the remaining seven in accidents involving vehicles or weapons. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed significant progress in Gaza, where fighting has spread to the south of the territory. “Hamas is on the verge of dissolution, the IDF (Israeli Armed Forces) is occupying its last strongholds,” Gallant said.
Meanwhile, Hamas has called on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to reject the 1993 Oslo Accords and engage in ‘armed resistance’. The call was made after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces are preparing for a possible large-scale operation in the West Bank.
with agencies
Source: DN
