Region

NAJAF, Iraq — The removal of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki would be an “important part” of the solution to Iraq’s political crisis, a spokesman for one of the country’s top Shiite clerics said.

The statement is the first from any of Iraq’s revered Shiite religious leaders to explicitly endorse Maliki’s ouster, and is one of a string of recent announcements indicating a more active national role for the usually taciturn clergy.

The speedy formation of a new more inclusive government is seen as a crucial step in countering last month’s onslaught by Islamic State (IS) militants, who have exploited resentment stoked by Iraq’s ineffectual and fractious political leaders.

“That’s part of the solution. An important part,” said Sheikh Ali Al Najafi, spokesman for his father Grand Ayatollah Bashir Al Najafi, referring to Maliki’s defenestration.

“This is the point of view of the marja Al Najafi,” he told AFP on Monday, a “marja” being one of majority Shiite Iraq’s four most senior Shiite religious leaders, known as the marjaiya.

The most senior of the marjaiya, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, through a spokesman has already called for the “formation an effective government that is acceptable on a... national level [and] avoids past mistakes”.

The June 20 statement stopped short of calling for Maliki to step down, but was nonetheless an implicit rebuke for a leader seen by many as sectarian and divisive.

Maliki, who came to power in 2006, has vowed to seek a third term after his coalition dominated April elections, but Iraq’s minority Sunni Arabs and ethnic Kurds — and even some fellow Shiites — have demanded his replacement.

Muscular clerics 

Sistani had earlier issued a call to arms against IS insurgents, the marjaiya’s first fatwa for jihad in Iraq for more than 90 years, despite decades of war and bloodshed.

“Now the marjaiya sees a real sustained danger for Iraq, and that Iraq could collapse within hours or days, and needs a stand from all its people to protect the unity of the country,” Najafi said, speaking in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.

Iraq was almost torn apart in 2006 and 2007 when the bombing of the Al Askari Shiite shrine north of Baghdad triggered a wave of sectarian slaughter between Shiite militias and Al Qaeda allied Sunni militants.

“The size and type of battle is different this time. The number of fighters is different. Daash is different from Al Qaeda,” Najafi said, referring to the former Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

“It’s something more developed than Al-Qaeda; strength-wise, coordination-wise, organisation-wise, funding-wise. It’s different from before.”

The marjaiya has in the past been more circumspect, and has stayed aloof from Iraq’s graft-ridden and dysfunctional political arena.

But things have changed, Najafi said, hinting at more muscular clerical interventions to come.

“When there’s a problem, it’s up to the father to address this problem... the marjaiya is the father,” he said.

“In any crisis, you will have the advice of the marjaiya. And that is for the stability of Iraq, its protection, its unity, and to reassure it and its neighbours and the region.

“With the crises, that we hope won’t continue, it is expected there will be continued advice.”

DAMASCUS — Bashar Assad was sworn in for a new term as Syria’s president on Wednesday, after an election which his opponents dismiss as a sham but which he said proved he had achieved victory after a “dirty war” to unseat him.

Once written off in the West as certain to fall, he launches his seven-year term in his securest position since the early days of the three-year-old war. Those close to Damascus say he now believes his Western and regional foes will be forced to deal with him as a bulwark against Sunni Islamist militants who advanced across northern Iraq last month.

At his inauguration he delivered a defiant speech, vowing to recover all Syria from Islamist insurgents and warning that Western and Arab countries would pay dearly for supporting rebels he described as terrorists.

Looking calm and confident, the president of 14 years repeatedly took aim at the West and Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab monarchies who have funded and armed the rebels that have taken control of much of the north and east of his country.

“Soon we will see the Arab, regional and Western states that supported terrorism pay a high price,” he said in the speech at the presidential palace in Damascus, broadcast on state TV.

“I repeat my call today to those who were misled to put down their guns, because we will not stop fighting terrorism and striking it wherever it is until we restore security to every spot of Syria,” Assad said.

But with swathes of the country still in rebel hands, opponents said the speech showed Assad was delusional.

“This is completely separated from reality. Assad is going on as if everything is normal and as if he didn’t lose two-thirds of the country,” Monzer Akbik of the Western-backed National Coalition opposition group told Reuters. “It was a theatrical election and this is a theatrical swearing in.”

Syria’s war has been the battleground for a sectarian struggle between groups supported by Sunni Muslim states including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Assad’s government backed by Shiite Iran.

Last month it spread dramatically in Iraq, where an Al Qaeda offshoot operating on both sides of the frontier, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), seized cities, changed its name to the Islamic State and declared its leader ruler of all Muslims.

ISIL has officially been rejected as a terrorist group by the Gulf states that support other Sunni fighters in Syria, but Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran all blame the Gulf kingdoms for supporting the wider Sunni militancy that feeds it.

Since advancing in Iraq, ISIL has also expanded its reach in Syria, using weapons seized from the fleeing Iraqi army to fight against rival rebel factions in Syria.

Those around Assad now feel that the ISIL threat will force Western leaders to seek a way to work with him against the common foe, said Salem Zahran, a Lebanese political analyst who is sympathetic to Assad and meets Syrian officials regularly.

“The Syrian leadership truly feels that the time of isolation is over.” 

Still standing 

Assad took power in 2000 after the death of his father Hafez who ruled for three decades. He has held firmly onto control in Damascus since the revolt began, defying confident predictions by Western leaders, including US President Barack Obama, that he would be swiftly toppled.

The revolt, which began with pro-democracy protests in 2011 that Assad dismissed in his speech as the “fake Arab Spring”, rapidly descended into sectarian civil war in which more than 170,000 people have been killed. According to the United Nations, 10.8 million Syrians now urgently need aid.

Western countries lined up from the outset behind the rebels that opposed Assad, but unlike in the case of Libya, where NATO warplanes helped bring down Muammar Qadhafi, they have refused to provide overt military support.

Wednesday’s inauguration comes nearly two years to the day since the nadir of Assad’s grip on power, when bombers managed to strike a security meeting of his inner circle in Damascus, killing close relatives leading his defence.

But although the rebels made further gains, Iran and Lebanon’s powerful Hizbollah Shiite militia came to Assad’s aid the following year, the start of a counter-offensive that has seen his forces go on to reclaim wide swathes of territory.

Meanwhile, the rise of Sunni jihadists like ISIL among the rebels has dampened Western enthusiasm for aiding Assad’s enemies, led to infighting within the rebel ranks and bolstered Assad’s assertions that his government is fighting extremism.

Obama threatened air strikes last year after blaming Assad for a poison gas attack that killed hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb. But the United States called off the operation when Assad agreed to give up chemical arms, effectively ending any threat that the West might use force to remove him.

In his speech, Assad dismissed the Syrian opposition abroad as traitors but said he would be willing to work with the country’s internal opposition, without giving details.

He also spoke about government plans for the future such as the need to fight corruption, ideas for religious educational reform and a programme to rebuild some damaged areas.

The inauguration featured a display of carefully orchestrated adulation that has been typical of his infrequent public appearances since the start of the war. Dressed in a dark suit, he arrived at the presidential palace in a black car and walked down a red carpet as a military band played. He entered a hall to applause from politicians and religious leaders.

Assad’s government says the election is proof of its willingness to enact democratic reforms. He ran against two other candidates, making it the first contested presidential election in Syria’s history, after four decades of referendums to approve the appointment of Assad and his father. Official returns gave him 88.7 per cent of the vote.

GAZA CITY — Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza Wednesday, killing four Palestinian children when its navy shelled a beach and launching deadly air strikes, as regional leaders sought fresh ways to end the confrontation.

The punishing air campaign aimed at halting cross-border rocket fire by Hamas fighters resumed after Egyptian-brokered truce efforts collapsed on Tuesday.

So far, Israel’s campaign, now in its ninth day, has killed 214 Palestinians, with a Gaza-based rights group saying over 80 per cent of them were civilians.

In the same period, fighters have fired more than 1,200 rockets at Israel, which on Tuesday claimed their first Israeli life.

Hamas said it had rejected the Egyptian truce efforts because it had not been included in the discussions.

The peace initiative continued on Wednesday, however, with a Hamas official holding talks with Egyptian leaders even as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also arrived in the Egyptian capital to join the diplomatic initiative.

In the latest violence, four children died and several were injured in Israeli shelling of a beach in Gaza City Wednesday afternoon, medics said.

The first strike hit at around 1300 GMT, prompting terrified children and adults on the beach to scatter. A second and third struck as they ran, setting fire to huts on the beach.

The strikes appeared to be the result of shelling by the Israeli navy against an area with small shacks used by fishermen.

The military had no immediate comment.

Several children ran inside a hotel where AFP journalists saw at least three with shrapnel injuries.

They were evacuated by ambulances, which also picked up more injured people from the beach, including a man who had part of his leg torn off.

The four bodies were later taken to Abu Hasira mosque, near where the boys had died.

The boys, all from the Bakr family, were laid out, wrapped in the yellow flags of the Fateh Party, in front of mourners.

Warplanes during the night struck about 40 sites across Gaza, among them political targets, as fighters also kept up their fire on Israel’s coastal plain, with four rockets shot down over metropolitan Tel Aviv.

The Israeli military also dropped flyers and sent text messages warning 100,000 people in northeastern Gaza to evacuate their homes ahead of an air campaign targeting “terror sites and operatives” in Zeitun and Shejaiya, two flashpoint districts east of Gaza City.

An identical message was sent to Beit Lahiya in the north, echoing a similar army warning on Sunday, when more than 17,000 residents of the north fled for their lives, most seeking refuge in UN-run schools.

Nowhere to run to  

But for patients at Al Wafa Hospital in Shejaiya, many of whom are paralysed or in a coma, the warning simply provoked even more fear.

“We cannot leave our patients, they are helpless,” director Basman Alashi told AFP, saying most of them were completely incapacitated and in no position to be moved.

“There is no place safe in Gaza! If a hospital is not safe, where is?” he said as the sound of nearby shelling rattled the windows.

The Israeli warnings appeared to have had no immediate effect, with only limited numbers seen leaving. Children picked up many of the flyers and played with them, an AFP correspondent said.

“Where should we go?” asked Faisal Hassan, a father of five who lives in Zeitun.

Hamas dismissed the warning as a scare tactic, telling residents there was “no need to worry”.

“This is part of the psychological war, intended to disrupt the domestic front,” it said in a statement.

But Israeli President Shimon Peres insisted the warning was to protect the innocent.

“We’re trying to defend our own people, as we must, and we’re also trying hard not to hit innocent people in Gaza,” he said on meeting Italy’s top diplomat.

Hamas in fresh Cairo talks 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday vowed to step up the military campaign after Hamas dismissed an Egyptian ceasefire proposal, firing scores of rockets over the border despite the army holding its fire for six hours.

“This would have been better resolved diplomatically... but Hamas leaves us no choice but to expand and intensify the campaign against it,” he said.

Azzam Al Ahmad, a senior member of Abbas’ Fateh movement, said a Hamas official was in Cairo Wednesday to hold talks with Egyptian officials.

Ahmad said he hoped the talks in Cairo would “crystalise a definite formula for an Egyptian initiative” or clarify its plan, which had proposed an end to hostilities from 0600 GMT on Tuesday.

Abbas himself later arrived in Cairo to join the diplomatic efforts and was slated to travel to Ankara on Thursday in search of regional support for an immediate end to the fighting.

Also in Cairo, Middle East peace Quartet envoy Tony Blair held talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri, on his second visit to the Egyptian capital in a week.

Blair told a media conference Egypt’s initiative was designed “to allow all the issues that are at the heart of this problem... to be dealt with in a thorough and proper way”.

PARIS — France said Wednesday the European Union could set up observer missions at border crossings between the Gaza Strip and Israel to try to encourage a lasting truce between the two sides.

The proposal by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius came as an Israeli air campaign on Gaza that has killed at least 208 people entered its ninth day after a failed ceasefire effort.

“Europe... is ready to do things, particularly through what we call EUBAM, which are forces that could monitor movements between Gaza and Israel,” he told French radio.

The EU had implemented a similar operation in 2005 at the Rafah crossing point between Gaza and Egypt.

In cooperation with Palestinian and Israeli officials, the mission of 70 European police officers monitored movements of people, goods and vehicles at the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only window to the outside world that bypasses Israel.

But it was suspended in June 2007 after Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip.

“Arab countries have said they support this, and we would also need the agreement of the five permanent members of the [UN] Security Council,” Fabius said.

The issue could be discussed this week in Brussels.

SHEJAIYA, Palestinian Territories — At Al Wafa rehabilitation hospital near Gaza City, a handful of doctors and nurses hover over paralysed patients, wondering how to protect them from more air strikes as threatened by Israel.

The patients lie mostly inert in beds lined up in the hospital’s reception, where staff moved them after an Israeli rocket crashed into the fourth floor.

Staff have appealed to international agencies for protection, and say the hospital is known to the Israeli army.

But it was hit again on Tuesday night.

Shortly afterwards, the Israeli army contacted the hospital three times, saying everyone should be evacuated by morning as the air force was planning to intensify its air strikes.

Director Basman Alashi explained that the 14 patients in the facility, many of them paralysed or in a coma, are in no position to be moved.

And even if they were, he said, there is no place to take them.

“There is no place safe in Gaza! If a hospital is not safe, where is?

“We cannot leave our patients, they are helpless. They cannot move, they cannot walk, they cannot eat, they cannot even scratch their heads by themselves,” he said.

Even as he spoke, the sound of shelling rattled the hospital windows. 

‘Hospital shaking’ 

More than 200 people have been killed in Gaza since the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas militants erupted in the early hours of July 8.

After an Egyptian truce effort failed to get off the ground on Tuesday, there appears to be no end in sight.

Mercifully, said staff doctor Hassan Sarsur, many of the patients are unconscious and unaware of what is happening.

But for others, the situation is terrifying.

“Several of our female patients are paralysed but conscious, and during the night they were crying with fear and clutching our hands,” Sarsur said.

Aya Abdeen, one of eight women in the facility, is paralysed from the waist down because of a tumour in her spinal cord.

“Yesterday, when they said that we have to evacuate and with all the shelling, of course I was afraid,” she told AFP.

“There was shelling all around and the hospital was shaking. And I am as you see, I can’t move,” she said.

“We are sick people, in a hospital!”

Karam Shublaq suffered a gunshot wound to his spinal cord in 2006 and is also paralysed from the waist down.

He is being treated for pressure sores and is fitted with a colostomy bag.

“We wake up to shelling and we go to sleep to shelling,” he said.

“We can’t even move and they hit the fourth floor of the building several times, so they moved us down here.”

To care for the patients, the staff are working 24-hour shifts, battling fatigue but also fear.

“We are human beings, of course we are scared,” said Sarsur.

“We don’t know what to do to protect the patients. We’d already evacuated the fourth floor and now we’ve evacuated all the floors except the reception.”

Several patients have been sent back to their families, but others require medical care that relatives can’t provide. 

Watching over brother  

Sixteen-year-old Nur Okasha has been sleeping at the hospital for a week to keep watch over his 13-year-old brother Mohammed who has been in a coma for several months after nearly drowning.

He lies motionless on the bed, his eyes half open as Nur flicks away flies.

“We wanted to take him home, but the tube in his trachea requires a suction machine, and we don’t always have electricity at home,” the teenager explained.

He keeps vigil at Mohammed’s side, putting in his eyedrops and talking to him.

“I want to make him feel like someone is always here. I tell him that his friends miss him. I talk to him about anything except the war,” he said.

Doctors at the hospital have reached out to international agencies in a bid to secure Israeli assurances that the facility won’t be hit again.

And a group of foreign activists are staying at the hospital in the hope that their presence might deter further attacks.

“The Israelis told the international  agencies that the hospital was not the target, only the area around it. But they have already hit us directly,” Sarsur said.

“We are helpless, the war comes to us and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

GAZA — Asked if a quick ceasefire with Israel might at least be welcome for saving lives, Abu Hashem simply scoffed.

“We’re living death,” he said.

The 50-year-old father of two strolled in the shade of a street in Gaza city, unfazed by the periodic thud of bombings.

“Israel has put us under siege for eight years, and the whole time we never felt we weren’t at war. People here have been left with nothing, so what more do we have to lose now?”

Hamas and other fighters have spurned an Egyptian truce deal to end nine days of fighting with Israel. That decision means bombs have continued to fall on the enclave. But many here support it anyway, saying their bleak peacetime life under an Israeli-Egyptian blockade was barely worth living.

Gaza medical officials say 208 Palestinians, including at least 174 civilians, among them 37 children, have been killed in strikes on the coastal enclave, an operation Israel says is aimed at halting rocket fire by Hamas and other groups.

Israel says the fighters have fired more than 1,200 rockets at it since July 8. One Israeli civilian has been killed.

Israel accepted the ceasefire on Tuesday. But the armed wing of Hamas dismissed it as “an initiative for kneeling and submission” and redoubled rocket fire.

Hamas and other groups say any deal must include a commitment to completely lift the blockade on Gaza, which has pushed poverty and unemployment to around 40 per cent and caused many Palestinians to lose hope in their future.

“Our situation is impossible to describe. It must end,” said Abu Hashem. “Israel knows a truce with no meaning is rejected by us, so now it feels it has a reason to hit us even harder.”

Israel says it takes pains to avoid civilian deaths when targeting fighters and sources of their fire, and its blockade is needed to prevent fighters from obtaining weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Hamas is inured to its people’s pain and uses them as “human shields”.

“It would have been preferable to resolve this by diplomacy and we tried to do so when we acceded to the Egyptian ceasefire proposal. But Hamas left us no choice but to broaden and intensify the campaign against it,” he said on Tuesday.

Hamas, which refuses to lay down its arms or recognise Israel, won parliamentary polls in 2006 and seized control of the densely populated Gaza Strip the next year. Israel and Egypt have restricted the import of many goods ever since.

Sewage on the beach

Life in the densely populated enclave has worsened in the last year since Egypt demolished hundreds of border smuggling tunnels which brought in weapons but were also the lifeblood of Gaza’s struggling economy.

Over half of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are on United Nations food aid. Electricity is cut for eight hours at a stretch. Building material to accommodate the mushrooming population is scarce. Taps spit out salty, often contaminated water.

Lack of fuel at sewage treatment plants has caked the beaches — one of the strip’s few diversions — in toxic waste.

“We can only stay steadfast and trust in God, despite our conditions. Nobody has done anything for us — we feel like all the Arabs have abandoned us, Egypt just wants us to give in, the rest of the world is silent,” said Ahmed Sha’ir, 18.

“We have no doubt in the resistance... If it takes a long campaign to get our rights, we’re ready,” he said.

‘Calm’ 

A similar eight-day round of fighting in November 2012 was ended by an Egyptian-mediated truce which included promises to pursue the easing of curbs on Gaza’s coastal fishing industry, farming in Israeli border areas and the movement of goods and people through Egypt. Almost none of these conditions lasted.

Robert Turner, the Gaza director of UNRWA, the main UN agency in the area which is now sheltering some 18,000 people fleeing the fighting, said a return to that status quo may bring few benefits to people.

“A return to ‘calm’ is a return to... confinement to Gaza and no external access to markets, employment, or education — in short, no access to the outside world,” Turner said on UNRWA’s website on Wednesday.

He noted that between March 2013 and May 2014 Israel did not approve any of his agency’s $100 million worth of projects to build schools and rebuild homes damaged in previous conflicts.

Israel cites fighters attacks and attempts to infiltrate into Israel though underground tunnels in maintaining its land and sea limits on Gaza. It has said it is committed to facilitating development and trade there after examining whether projects could have any possible military applications.

But among average Palestinians, faith in Israel or a swift turn in their own fortunes is almost non-existent.

“That country respects no agreements and breaks any deal to serve its own interests. Anything it does for us, it has to be forced,” said Ameen Abu Al Kas, a vegetable seller in Gaza City.

“We’ve seen them attack us and stop a hundred times and things still get worse. We’re beyond tired, we’re dead.”

GAZA CITY — The children of the Attar clan have lived through three wars in just over five years, each time fleeing their homes as Israel bombarded their neighborhood in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

Their psychological scars show. Some act out, others cling to their mothers or withdraw, like 12-year-old Ahmed who sat by himself Monday on a bench in the courtyard of a UN school where his family once again sought shelter.

“They bombed very close to my house,” said the boy, looking down and avoiding eye contact. “I’m scared.”

Experts said it will be increasingly difficult to heal such victims of repeated trauma.

“For the majority of the children [in Gaza], it is the third time around,” said Bruce Grant, the chief of child protection for the Palestinian territories in the United Nation’s children’s agency, UNICEF. “It reduces their ability to be resilient and to bounce back. Some will not find their way back to a sense of normalcy. Fear will become their new norm.”

The Attar clan lives in Atatra, a neighborhood in northeastern Gaza, just a few hundred metres from Israel. Gaza militants often launch rockets at Israel from border areas, turning them into flashpoints and frequent targets of Israeli strikes.

Residents of Atatra fled their homes in Israel’s three-week military offensive in the winter of 2008-2009, during a week of cross-border fighting in November 2012 and again over the weekend.

After Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets over Atatra on Saturday warning residents to leave, sisters Mariam and Sada Attar bundled a few belongings into plastic bags, and rushed out of their homes. They had 10 children in tow, as well as Mariam’s husband Omar, who she said suffers from stress-induced psychological disorders and can no longer function normally.

The families sought shelter in the same UN school where they stayed during the previous two rounds of fighting. In all, 20 UN schools took in more than 17,000 displaced Gazans, many of them children, after Saturday’s warnings by Israel that civilians must clear out of northern Gaza.

Members of the Attar clan took over part of the second floor, with more than 40 people sleeping in each classroom. Mariam, Sada, Omar and the children were squeezed into one half of a room, their space demarcated by benches. Another family from the clan stayed in the other half of the room. A blanket draped across an open doorway offered the only measure of privacy.

In the classroom, the scene was chaotic, with children pushing and shoving each other, and mothers yelling at them to behave. There was nothing to do for children or grown-ups, except to wait.

Mariam Attar, 35, said they spent the night on the hard floor for lack of mattresses.

She sat on the floor, her back leaning against a wall and held her youngest, 16-month-old Mahmoud. She said her older children have become clingy, some asking that she accompany them to the communal toilet.

Recalling the latest bombings, she said: “We felt the house was going to fall on top of us and so the children started to scream. I was screaming and my husband was screaming.”

Her 14-year-old son Mohammed said the family cowered on the ground in the living room during the bombing to avoid being hit by shrapnel. He said the time passed slowly because they had no electricity or TV.

Mohammed and Ahmed, who is from another branch of the clan, said they and other children often play “Arabs and Jews”, fighting each other with toy guns or wooden sticks as make-believe weapons. Arabs always win, the boys said.

Rasem Shamiya, a counselor who works for the UN school system, said many of the children show signs of trauma, including trouble paying attention, aggressive behaviour or avoiding contact with others. “They are very stressed,” he said. “Since these children were born, they have never known peace.”

Sada Attar, 43, said she worries her children and others in that generation will come to see violence as normal.

“These disturbed children are not going to be good for Israel’s long term interests,” she said. “The child will naturally rise up and confront the Zionist enemy with the stone, with fire, with everything in their power.”

Shortly after she spoke, the children got a brief break from the chaos. Volunteers showed up in the school courtyard, carrying crayons, paper, hula hoops and soccer balls. Ahmed and other boys started kicking a ball around and he quickly became engrossed in the game.

Israeli children, especially in the areas close to Gaza, have also been affected. Since 2000, Gaza fighters have fired thousands of rockets at Israeli communities. Psychologists have found high rates of anxiety and bed-wetting among children in the border town of Sderot.

During the current bout, Israeli mothers were seen shielding their children with their bodies as sirens warned of incoming rockets. Other footage showed children weeping and cowering in fear as explosions were heard near their homes.

Several Israeli children were hurt by rockets, including 11- and 12-year-old sisters playing outside, and a 16-year-old boy who was seriously hurt by shrapnel as he returned from a barber.

In Gaza, about one-fourth of the over 190 Palestinians killed in the past week were children, according to UN figures.

The children’s fears are very real and parents in Gaza are increasingly unable to reassure them, said Pierre Krahenbuhl, who heads the UN agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees.

“Today, we met with families who shared with us that they have simply no more answers to give when the children ask them why are the homes shaking, why is there so much destruction,” he said.

On Tuesday, some of the displaced, including Mariam, Sada and their children, left the school and returned home, apparently encouraged by Egypt’s call for a cease-fire that was to take effect later in the day.

However, the hoped-for lull only lasted a few hours. By Tuesday afternoon, Gaza fighters had fired about three dozen rockets at Israel and Israel resumed air strikes on targets in Gaza.

Some members of the Attar clan chose to remain at the school despite faint hopes for a ceasefire. “I want to go home, but I am still afraid,” said 42-year-old Mohammed Attar, a relative of the sisters.

GENEVA — Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are without water after Israeli air strikes that have wrecked the water and sewage system and the whole strip is threatened with a water crisis within days, aid agencies warned on Tuesday.

The eight-day assault has caused massive damage to infrastructure and destroyed at least 560 homes, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said.

“Within days, the entire population of the strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement.

If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis”, he said.

“Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

Several municipal water engineeers have been killed in the conflict and Gaza’s water service provider has suspended all field operations until the safety of its staff can be guaranteed, according to the ICRC, an independent aid agency whose teams have helped with emergency repairs.

“Water is a problem and it can quickly turn into a catastrophe,” ICRC spokewoman Nada Doumani told a news briefing.

At least 184 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting, the worst flare-up in two years. The stated purpose of Israel’s bombing is quieting cross-border rocket fire from Hamas militants fired into southern Israel.

Untreated sewage

UNRWA said the destruction compounded the effects of eight years of Israel’s blockade of the enclave.

“The water and sewage network is barely functioning, and with the sustained bombardment of the past 8 days, it’s as good as destroyed,” UNRWA spokesman Sami Mshasha told the briefing.

“We’re looking at 90 million litres of untreated sewage that flows into the ocean every day because there is no electricity to treat it. Ninety per cent of the drinking water is not fit for human consumption.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO), a UN agency, warned last week that health services in the occupied Palestinian territory were on the brink of collapse among severe shortages in medicines and fuel for hospital generators.

Hamas militants fired volleys of rockets from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, drawing a threat by Israel to abandon an Egyptian-proposed truce it had unilaterally accepted.

“We are extremely worrried as UNRWA that if the ceasefire being negotiated today does not succeed, then the much-talked about ground offensive might unfold and we might see an Israeli military incursion into Gaza,” Mshasha said.

If there is a truce, the ICRC hopes for better access to the increasing numbers of casualties, spokeswoman Doumani said.

The ICRC is “documenting violations of international humanitarian law” in the conflict, she said.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on Friday voiced serious doubts that Israeli’s military operation against Gaza complied with international law banning the targeting of civilians, and called on both sides to respect the rules of war.

GAZA — Instead of enjoying celebrations and nighttime feasts, Palestinians in Gaza are spending the Islamic holy month of Ramadan cowering in their homes and temporary shelters from Israeli bombs.

Muslims fast during the daylight hours in Ramadan and sundown would normally bring a carnival atmosphere to Gaza’s crowded streets, with lanterns strung above alleys and children fuelled by sweets playing until the early hours.

Suhair Abu Jalilah and her two daughters are among the some 17,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in Gaza to crowded UN schools after Israel warned it would bomb their neighbourhoods.

“There’s just no joy this season. We’re sleeping on mattresses in a crowded hallway. They provide us our iftar [the evening meal to break the fast] but other times we’re eating porridge and thyme,” she said as Israeli drones buzzed overhead.

“We’ve been so tired and afraid. We hope so much to return and feel some kind of safety soon.”

The Gaza Strip already faced a bleak Ramadan because of soaring unemployment and poverty, but the holiday coincided with a battle between Hamas fighters launching rockets at Israel and Israeli aircraft pounding the territory.

At least 194 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, and a truce proposed by Egypt on Monday failed to take hold.

Stores are now shuttered and people stay indoors, listening out for the shriek of rockets and thud of bombs.

Mosque prayers which usually follow the evening meal have mostly been abandoned after Israel destroyed one mosque and damaged another 34, according to the local Al Mezan Association for Human Rights.

Nearly 260 civilian homes have been destroyed and 1,034 damaged, the group said.

Israel said the mosque was used to store rockets, and says its attacks only target militant weapons and personnel, and strive to avoid civilian casualties.

The Hamas Islamist group which runs the Gaza Strip would usually mark Ramadan by setting up kitchens for the needy and disbursing stipends to public sector workers.

But its political members have now gone into hiding while fighters have taken to the front, leaving more humble employees to cope with the crisis.

Like most other government workers, doctors in the trauma ward of Gaza’s main Al Shifa Hospital have not received a salary in three months and just half their wages for four months before due to a cash crunch in the Hamas government and internal Palestinian political squabbles.

Still, medics have worked 24-hour shifts every other day, treating the inflow of bloodied and limbless patients. They keep their fast by not drinking water or eating in daylight and sit down for a modest Iftar when work allows.

“The meal in the hospital isn’t great of course, but seeing the condition people are in you’re grateful for what you have,” Doctor Mohammed Belami said.

“We know we’ll get our wages eventually, as well as our rights as a country. In the meantime, it feels good to help people and it helps me forget the psychological stress and low morale I’m going through,” he said.

Mohammed Silmi sat in the hospital bed next to his prostrate 14-year old nephew, who periodically grunts and writhes in pain, a cast covering his arm and much of his left side.

An air strike, his uncle said, landed in an alley near where he and a group of other boys were playing on Wednesday.

“For us, Ramadan is ruined. He’ll always remember it as the worst in his life.” Silmi said.

GENEVA — Aid agencies said Tuesday they were ready to truck desperately-needed supplies to 2.9 million more Syrians after the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution backing cross-border convoys.

“UN agencies have supplies ready to go to all of those hard to reach areas. They had those in place for some time,” Amanda Pitt, spokeswoman for the UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, told reporters.

The United Nations estimates that 10.8 million people — or half the pre-war population — need aid in Syria, many in areas cut off by fighting.

It was “too early to say” when the first aid convoys might be able to leave Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, Pitt said.

“If we are able to use all those crossings and if insecurity is not a problem on the other side — which it could be — then we could potentially reach another 2.9 million people that we have not been able to reach so far,” she added.

“That’s key for us — reaching people who desperately need help.”

Since the Syrian conflict erupted in March 2011, the international community has been split over how to help the embattled population.

The issue has been caught up in wrangling over Syrian sovereignty.

The regime has balked at the idea of aid coming across borders in zones controlled by rebels — notably in the north, near Turkey — seeing it as tantamount to UN recognition and as a means to supply its opponents.

As a result, agencies have had to first bring aid to warehouses in Syria, before convoys fan out across the country.

The UN Security Council had long been deadlocked over Syria, with the West facing off against Damascus’ key international ally Russia.

Under the terms of the cross-border aid resolution, which is valid for six months and expected to be renewed, trucks will be subject to UN controls to ensure that they are carrying only humanitarian supplies.

The resolution also calls on the warring sides to allow unhindered access and guarantee security.

Both sides have been accused of using aid as a weapon and of trying to starve out areas held by their adversaries.

Fighting has also made it too dangerous for convoys to reach some areas regularly, with some aid workers paying with their lives.

“Insecurity is one of the biggest issue that we face. Syria is essentially a war zone. And we continue to face very difficult administrative procedures with the government. Funding is also an issue,” said Pitt.

Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the World Food Programme, said her agency was ready to go.

“It is estimated that nearly half the people in Syria are food insecure and don’t know where their next meal will come from,” Byrs said.