Region

GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestine — The main UN aid agency in besieged Gaza warned it will have to stop operations by the end of Wednesday because it is running out of fuel as Hamas said the death toll from Israeli strikes had surged by more than 700 in a single day.

Alarm has grown about the spiralling humanitarian crisis in the heavily bombarded Gaza Strip where one doctor said he was forced to perform emergency surgery on the wounded without anaesthetic.

Israel has cut off impoverished Gaza's usual water, food and other supplies, and fewer than 70 relief trucks have entered since the war started, "a drop of aid in an ocean of need", warned UN chief Antonio Guterres.

Inside the battered Palestinian territory, Abu Ali Zaarab, whose family house in Rafah was bombed, charged angrily that "they're not waging war on Hamas, they're waging war on children... It's a massacre."

Tempers flared earlier at the United Nations where Guterres decried the "epic suffering" in Gaza and the "collective punishment" of its 2.4 million people, drawing a furious response from Israel.

US President Joe Biden brokered the entry of relief trucks via Egypt, shared the concern that the aid lifeline is "not fast enough".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "food, water, medicine and other essential humanitarian assistance must be able to flow into Gaza" and that "humanitarian pauses must be considered for these purposes".

As the Gaza war has raged, violence has also risen sharply in the occupied West Bank, where health officials said more than 100 Palestinians had been killed, mostly in raids by Israeli troops or in clashes with Israeli settlers.

 'This is a tragedy' 

On the 19th day of Israeli air and artillery strikes and a near-total land, sea and air blockade of Gaza, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA warned operations are at breaking point.

"If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the Gaza Strip," said the agency which provides aid to 600,000 displaced in Gaza, where many families have slept in the open.

Israel has refused to allow fuel shipments into Gaza, fearing Hamas will use it for weapons and explosives and accusing the militant group of stockpiling supplies in large tanks.

Aid groups have warned that more people will die if medical equipment, water desalination plants and ambulances stop running in Gaza, where the only power plant went offline weeks ago.

Patients are already being treated on the floors of hospitals overwhelmed with thousands wounded by bombing. The Red Cross has warned that hospitals, once the generators stop running, “turn into morgues”.

“We performed a number of surgeries on the wounded without anaesthetic,” said Ahmad Abdul Hadi, an orthopaedic surgeon working in the emergency room of Nasser hospital, Khan Yunis.

“It’s tough and painful, but with the lack of resources, what can we do?”

Aid agencies report that emergency shelters and tent cities are heaving under the weight of 1.4 million displaced — more than half the population of the 40 kilometre long coastal strip.

Air strikes have kept hitting Gaza, where Israel says it is targeting Hamas sites, including tunnels and munitions depots, but where many residential buildings have been reduced to rubble.

Amine Abu Jazar, from Rafah, recounted how “at midnight, while we were sleeping, we suddenly felt shrapnel and rocks falling on us”.

“We already have injured and martyrs among us, this is a tragedy. There’s not even any electricity to see each other, the dead or the injured.”

JENIN, Occupied Palestine — More than 100 Palestinians have been killed across the occupied West Bank since war erupted between Israel and Gaza's rulers Hamas on October 7, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

Violence had already spiralled in the West Bank before the Gaza war, with the highest death toll in the Palestinian territory since at least 2005.

Many of the Palestinian deaths came in raids by Israeli troops but there has also been a rise in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, with civilians and fighters killed on both sides.

Since October 7, tensions and bloodshed have surged in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian death toll reaching 102, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.

Over the same period, the Israeli military has reported one member of the security forces killed while taking part in a raid.

In the latest violence, four Palestinians were killed in Jenin and one in Qalqilya, both in the northern West Bank. One Palestinian was also killed in Qalandia, just north of Jerusalem.

The health ministry blamed Israeli “bullets and missiles”.

The Israeli military said it launched a drone strike on “terrorists” in the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, where it said “armed terrorists fired and hurled explosive devices at Israeli security forces”.

In Qalqilya, a military spokeswoman told AFP, soldiers fired on people who “hurled explosive devices, Molotov cocktails and rocks at the forces”.

Troops also opened fire in Qalandia, which the army said came in response to suspects who “threw burning tyres, blocks and IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and shot at forces”.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and withdrew from Gaza in 2005, subsequently imposing a crippling blockade on the coastal territory.

BEIRUT — Six people, including two children, were killed on Tuesday in Russian strikes on a displacement camp in Syria’s northwest, the country’s last main rebel bastion, a war monitor said.

Tensions have soared in northwest Syria since a drone attack on a military academy graduation ceremony in Homs earlier this month killed dozens of people, with the government blaming “terrorists”.

“Six civilians, including a woman and two of her children, were killed and eight others injured after Russian warplanes carried out two air strikes on a camp for displaced people” in the west of Idlib province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), led by Al Qaeda’s former Syria branch, controls swathes of Idlib province and parts of the neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

“Russian forces have increased their air strikes since the Homs attack, while HTS intensified its drone strikes,” observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

On Sunday, Syrian army shelling in the country’s northwest killed six children, four from the same family, said the British-based group with a wide network of sources inside Syria.

The attack on the military academy in Homs was one of the bloodiest to hit government forces since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011.

Civil war erupted in Syria after President Bashar Assad’s government crushed peaceful protests.

The conflict has killed more than half-a-million people and displaced millions after spiralling into a devastating war involving foreign armies, militias and extremists.

UNITED NATIONS, United States — UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday alleged violations of international law as Israel pounds Gaza, and urged an immediate humanitarian ceasefire to bring in relief.

"I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law," Guterres told a Security Council session, without explicitly naming Israel.

Guterres, who personally travelled to the crossing between Egypt and Gaza in a push to let in assistance, welcomed the crossing of three aid convoys so far through the Rafah crossing.

"But it is a drop of aid in an ocean of need. In addition, our UN fuel supplies in Gaza will run out in a matter of days. That would be another disaster," Guterres said.

“To ease epic suffering, make the delivery of aid easier and safer, and facilitate the release of hostages, I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”

The Security Council session is bringing together top diplomats including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has previously rejected calls for a ceasefire, saying it would only allow Hamas to regroup.

More than 5,700 Palestinians have been killed across the Gaza Strip in retaliatory Israeli bombardments, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry said.

The United Nations on Tuesday called for improved coordination among humanitarian groups in making sure the small amount of aid now moving into the Gaza Strip contained only the most needed items.

UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, warned it would be forced to stop working across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday unless there were urgent fuel deliveries to the war-torn territory.

“If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the Gaza Strip as of tomorrow night,” UNRWA said on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.

Aid agencies have sounded the alarm about the lack of fuel, which is used to power vital services in Gaza such as hospitals which are relying on generators.

“Time is running out. We urgently need fuel,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA communications director, told AFP.

Six hospitals across Gaza have already shut down due to the lack of fuel, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Tuesday.

The relief agency also said that some of the food delivered into Gaza so far, such as rice and lentils, had been impractical given the dwindling availability of fresh water and fuel.

Israel has cut off water, food, fuel and energy supplies to Gaza, and only a trickle of aid has been allowed in from Egypt in recent days under a US-brokered deal.

“An additional challenge in a very limited flow of supplies is that we are not really receiving the most needed supplies for Gaza, or the most relevant,” UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai said.

“In one of the shipments over the last couple of days, we received boxes of rice and lentils,” she told journalists at the UN in Geneva via video-link from the Jordanian capital Amman, where UNRWA has its headquarters.

“But for people to cook lentils and rice, they need water and gas. And therefore these kinds of supplies, while very generous and well intended, are not very usable right now,” she said.

Alrifai added that before October 7, around 500 trucks a day were entering Gaza from Israel and Egypt, with a mixture of commercial goods, food, aid and fuel.

But only a few dozen trucks carrying food, medicine and water have entered Gaza via the southern border with Egypt since a deal entered into operation on Saturday.

“We will need to get better as a consortium of humanitarians in sending very explicit lists of what is most needed,” Alrifai said.

Medical aid 

Meanwhile, the WHO said it had been unable to distribute any life-saving health supplies from the truck convoys to major hospitals in northern Gaza, because of a lack of security guarantees.

It said the main Al-Shifa hospital in the north now had three patients for every two beds.

“In addition to the hospitals that have had to close due to damage and attacks, six hospitals across the Gaza Strip have already shut down due to lack of fuel,” the WHO said in a statement.

Medical supplies have been delivered to four hospitals in southern Gaza and medics “took boxes of supplies off the trucks and straight into operating theatres, where doctors have been performing surgeries without anaesthesia or other basic surgical supplies”, the agency said.

RAFAH, Occupied Palestine — Two elderly Hamas hostages were airlifted to an Israeli hospital to be reunited with family on Tuesday, as the United States demanded Palestinian resistance fighters release more than 200 other captives before Gaza ceasefire talks are considered.

Hamas fighters stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, and killed at least 1,400 people, , according to Israeli officials.

Hamas fighters took 222 people hostage following the October 7 attack on Israel. The hostages include dozens of dual nationals and foreigners.

More than 5,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed across the Gaza Strip in Israeli bombardments, according to the latest toll from the health ministry in Gaza.

Nurit Cooper, 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, and their octogenarian husbands were among the hostages seized on October 7.

Hamas released Cooper and Lifshitz on Monday citing "compelling humanitarian" reasons, after mediation by Qatar and Egypt.

Their release comes days after a US mother and daughter were freed.

An AFP journalist saw a military helicopter bringing Cooper and Lifshitz to a medical centre in Tel Aviv early on Tuesday.

 'Ceasefire calls' 

In response to the worst attack in its 75-year history, Israel launched operation "Swords of Iron", besieging Gaza and firing a near-continuous barrage of strikes to "erase Hamas" from the enclave.

While the Israeli military has claimed success in "eliminating high-ranking commanders" and destroying Hamas infrastructure, humanitarian groups have said that Palestinian civilians are paying too steep a price for the campaign.

AFP has not been able to independently verify the death toll given by Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, but the scale of the destruction is clear.

Thousands of buildings have been levelled and more than a million people are believed to have been displaced in the besieged territory.

Gaza City resident Ayman Abu Shamalah was among the tens of thousands who heeded an Israeli warning to flee to south Gaza.

Despite the move, he told AFP that his pregnant wife, their three-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were killed in an Israeli air strike on Rafah in southern Gaza.

“They put my son’s shattered body in a blue bag,” he said, sobbing.

Across Gaza, water, food and other basic supplies are running out. Only a trickle of aid is being allowed to cross into Gaza from Egypt.

 ‘Well prepared’ 

Israel has shown little sign of slowing its offensive.

On Tuesday, Gaza’s Hamas government said that Israeli air strikes during the night killed at least 140 people.

But the timing of an anticipated full-scale ground offensive remains unclear.

“We are well prepared for the ground operations in the south,” chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi told troops.

“The Southern Command has quality operational plans. There are tactical, operative and strategic considerations that have provided additional time,” he said.

 ‘Nowhere else to go’ 

Chief among those considerations may be the labyrinth of tunnels and strong points that Hamas is believed to have developed to thwart any Israeli invasion.

But there are also fears about how Hamas’s allies around the Middle East would respond to a ground war.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War has reported an uptick in attacks on Israeli and US targets from Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.

There are daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hizbollah militant group.

At least 41 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally, mostly combatants but also at least four civilians, including a Reuters journalist.

And four people have been killed in Israel, three soldiers and a civilian.

The pace of evacuations has increased on both sides of the border, with the UN saying nearly 20,000 people had fled villages in south Lebanon as the fighting rages.

Israel has also ordered the evacuation of thousands of people from communities near its northern border.

RAFAH, Occupied Palestine — Gaza's health ministry said on Monday that more than 5,000 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian enclave since Israel launched its withering bombing campaign more than two weeks ago.

Alarm has surged about the spiralling humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war sparked by the October 7 Hamas attack that, Israeli officials say, killed more than 1,400 people. Hamas also took more than 200 hostages.

On a day when Israel's army reported more than 300 new strikes within 24 hours, Gaza's health ministry said the death toll had surged above 5,000, more than 2,000 of them children, in figures AFP has not been able to independently verify.

Thousands of buildings have been destroyed and more than one million people displaced in the territory that has been under siege and largely deprived of water, food and other basic supplies.

About a dozen trucks carrying desperately needed aid, the third convoy in three days, arrived inside Gaza from Egypt on Monday through Rafah, Gaza's only crossing not controlled by Israel.

The United States, which has brokered the entry of the aid convoys, has vowed a "continued flow" of relief goods into Gaza, even as UN aid agencies have said far more is needed.

Fighting raged unabated overnight, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed again that Israel would "erase Hamas" and as a full-scale ground invasion loomed.

Gaza's Hamas-controlled government media office said that "more than 60 were martyred in the raids" during the night, including 17 in a single strike that hit a house in Gaza's north, and at least 10 others were killed in new strikes early Monday.

The Israeli military said it had hit "over 320 military targets in the Gaza Strip" in the past 24 hours.

Call for blood donations

Rafah resident Mohammed Abu Sabalah said he had returned home from the local mosque after dawn prayers on Monday and that “a quarter of an hour later there was a bombing”.

“We couldn’t see anything because of the thick smoke,” he said, adding that “we thank God that we’ve emerged safe and sound” with “only a few windows and doors destroyed”.

Israeli forces are massed near the Gaza border, and smaller units have already carried out limited incursions, targeting Hamas and hoping to rescue hostages, whose number Israel now puts at 222.

Tensions have been inflamed in the occupied West Bank, where 95 Palestinians have been killed in clashes involving Israeli forces or settlers since fighting began in Gaza, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.

In Gaza, where thousands have been wounded, the health ministry issued a statement saying “citizens are called upon to immediately go to hospitals and blood bank branches to donate blood”.

Alarm has grown about the dire needs of the 2.4 million civilians trapped inside the 40 kilometre long coastal strip that was already blockaded and impoverished before the war.

Children killed in an Israeli air strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis were on Monday laid to rest in a makeshift grave, while in Rafah men were filling plastic jerrycans from containers with now scare safe drinking water.

US President Joe Biden brokered the passage of aid convoys with Egyptian and Israeli leaders in talks last week, but the United Nations estimates Gaza needs about 100 trucks of relief goods every day.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said Sunday’s delivery of food, water and medical supplies was “another small glimmer of hope for the millions of people in dire need of humanitarian aid”.

“But they need more, much more.”

Israel has rejected the entry of fuel into Gaza, fearing Hamas could use it for weapons and explosives.

This has sparked warnings that soon Gaza’s ambulances, hospital incubators for infants and water desalination plants will soon stop functioning.