The deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1% of the territory’s prewar population — the latest indication of the 11-week-old conflict's staggering human toll.
Israel’s aerial and ground attacks has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal territory. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday from the United Nations and other agencies.
After many delays, the U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution Friday calling for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.
The United States won the removal of a tougher call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. It abstained in the vote, as did Russia, which wanted a stronger language. The resolution was the first on the war to make it through the council after the U.S. vetoed two earlier ones that called for humanitarian pauses and a full cease-fire.
ISRAEL VOWS TO KEEP UP PRESSURE
The U.S. also negotiated the removal of language that would have given the U.N. authority to inspect aid going into Gaza, something Israel says it must do to.
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, thanked the U.S. for its support and sharply criticized the U.N. for its failure to condemn Hamas' Oct. 7 operation. The U.S. vetoed a resolution in October that would have included a condemnation because it didn’t also underline Israel’s right to self-defense.
Hamas said in a statement that the U.N. resolution should have demanded an immediate halt to Israel’s aggression, and it blamed the United States for pushing “to empty the resolution of its essence” before Friday’s Security Council vote.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, reiterated his longstanding call for a humanitarian cease-fire.
He said after the vote that the way Israel was conducting its operation is “creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian assistance” in Gaza, where the UN says the aid available is just 10% of what is needed.“
He also condemned Israel' "collective punishment of the Palestinian people," adding that Hamas' operations "do not free Israel from its own legal obligations under international law.”
Israel, shielded by the United States, has resisted international pressure to scale back its aggression. The occupation army has said that months of fighting lie ahead in southern Gaza, an area packed with the vast majority of the territory’s 2.3 million people, many of whom were ordered to flee combat in the north earlier in the war.
Evacuation orders have pushed displaced civilians into ever-smaller areas of the south as troops focus on Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city.
The Israeli army said late Thursday that it is sending more ground forces, including combat engineers, to Khan Younis.
On Friday, it ordered tens of thousands of residents to leave their homes in Burej, an urban refugee camp, and surrounding communities in central Gaza, suggesting a ground assault there could be next.
In the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, an airstrike on a house killed six people, according to Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies at a hospital. Among the dead were a married couple and their 4-month-old child, said the infant’s grandfather, Anwar Dhair.
Rafah is one of the few places in Gaza not under evacuation orders, but it has been targeted in Israeli strikes almost every day.
The air and ground campaign continued in the north, where Israel says it is in the final stages .
Mustafa Abu Taha, a Palestinian farm worker, said many areas of his hard-hit Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiyah have become inaccessible because of massive destruction from airstrikes.
“They are hitting anything moving,” he said of Israeli forces.
RISING DEATH TOLL AND HUNGER
The Health Ministry said Friday that it has documented 20,057 Palestinians killed Israel in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, and more than 50,000 wounded.
Israel’s army says 139 of its soldiers have died in the ground offensive. It says it has killed thousands of Hamas resistance fighters, but it has not presented any evidence to back up the claim.
For most of its war, Israel also stopped entry of food, water, fuel and other supplies except for truck convoys of aid from Egypt, which cover only a fraction of the needs in Gaza.
Because of insufficient aid entering Gaza, the extent of starvation has eclipsed the near-famines of recent years in Afghanistan and Yemen, and the risk of famine increases each day, Thursday’s U.N. report said.
Israel opened the Kerem Shalom crossing several days ago amid international demands to increase the flow of aid. But the army struck the Palestinian side of the crossing Thursday, killing four staffers, and the U.N. said it was unable to pick up aid there for delivery. It was not immediately known if the U.N. resumed work there Friday.
The Israeli war on Gaza has also pushed Gaza’s health sector into collapse.
Only nine of its 36 health facilities are still partially functioning, all located in the south, according to the World Health Organization.
The agency reported soaring rates of diseases in Gaza, including a five-fold rise in diarrhea and increases in cases of meningitis, skin rashes and scabies.
* This story has been edited by Ahram Online.
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