Israel blocking aid, fuel to Gaza hospitals
Nora Barrows-Friedman Rights and Accountability. 12 January 2024
Palestine Red Crescent Society staff held funerals for four of its paramedic team members who were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on an ambulance, Deir al-Balah, 11 January.
Naaman Omar APA imagesIsrael killed more than 150 Palestinians and continued to block aid to hospitals in the Gaza Strip while theatrically rejecting South Africa’s charges of genocide at the Hague on Friday.
A UN official warned that if Israel does not allow fuel into Gaza immediately, aid trucks will be stuck at the southern Rafah crossing, unable to distribute anything at all.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, Israel committed 13 massacres against Palestinians between Thursday and Friday alone.
The Palestinian death toll has risen to 23,706 since 7 October, with more than 60,000 injured, the ministry reported on Friday.
Thousands more are still missing or buried under the rubble.
All internet and telephone systems have been destroyed by Israeli attacks, plunging Gaza into a communications blackout once again, according to the service provider Paltel.
Meanwhile, the head of Human Rights Watch stated Israel must abide by the International Court of Justice’s ruling, which will likely be announced at the end of this month.
“If Israel does not comply with the measures or orders of the court, then it is up to the international community to ensure that they are leveraging whatever pressure that they can to encourage Israel to actually implement the measures,” Tirana Hassan told Reuters.
Hassan said that Human Rights Watch was able to document Israel’s “crime of starvation” as a means of warfare on the people of Gaza.
“In the throes of this war, what we have seen is consistent, flagrant violations of international humanitarian law,” Hassan told Reuters.
Israel “systematically” blocking aid
Israel is methodically blocking aid convoys headed for hospitals in northern Gaza, or slowing them down using lengthy inspections, according to United Nations aid agencies.
He explained that Israel had only partially approved three out of 21 aid missions requested by his agency.
“In particular, they have been very systematic in not allowing us to support hospitals, which is something that is reaching a level of inhumanity that, for me, is beyond comprehension,” he said.
But beginning Saturday, all aid trucks will be stuck at the southern Rafah crossing and no humanitarian aid will be distributed across Gaza, De Domenico warned.
“We will simply be unable to unload [the trucks],” De Domenico told reporters on Friday.
“We don’t have the fuel for the forklift and we do not have the fuel for the trucks that are distributing that assistance out to where the people in need are,” he said.
Paramedics killed
Awni Khattab, the director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s ambulance center, was released on Friday after more than 50 days in Israeli detention.
The medical association posted video of Khattab’s emotional reunion with his family members and colleagues:
Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the head of al-Shifa hospital, has still not been released from Israeli detention, along with approximately 100 other health care workers.
This week, PRCS held funerals for four of its paramedic team members killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on their ambulance in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.
Two patients inside the ambulance were also killed.
“Our colleagues were intentionally targeted while inside an ambulance clearly marked with the Red Crescent emblem.”
Inside al-Aqsa hospital
The United Nations’ human rights office stated on Wednesday that it is “deeply concerned” that Israeli forces “have placed civilian lives at serious risk by ordering residents from various parts of Middle Gaza to relocate to Deir al-Balah – while continuing to conduct airstrikes on the city.”
The UN added that four separate strikes on Deir al-Balah since the beginning of January have killed more than 40 Palestinians.
“It is clear – as the UN has repeatedly stressed – that there is no safe place in Gaza,” the agency said.
The UN noted that recent Israeli airstrikes and sniper attacks on al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah – the only partially-functioning hospital in central Gaza – “has led many medical staff to take the difficult decision to evacuate the hospital, despite the high need for medical care resulting from the continuing strikes.”
On Friday, the hospital lost power as a result of a lack of fuel – putting patients, including infants in incubators, at extreme risk.
Many of the patients are arriving with “horrific, traumatic injuries,” according to an emergency doctor.
One of the physicians, obstetrician Deborah Harrington, said there was little to no pain relief medication available while treating injured patients.
“I can’t get out of my mind – a child came in alive, literally burnt to the bone, their hands were contracting. Their face was just charcoal, and they were alive and talking. And we had no morphine,” she told the BBC.
“I won’t be able to wipe that memory and the smell, being treated on the floor,” Harrington said.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza announced on Friday that the bed occupancy rate “in all hospitals is more than 340 percent” across departments and intensive care units.
Journalists killed
Israel has killed more than 100 journalists and media workers in Gaza since 7 October.
Wael al-Dahdouh’s wife and two children were killed in an Israeli airstrike in late October; and his cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa was killed in a drone strike last month.
The Israeli military claimed that al-Dahdouh was an operative with Islamic Jihad and that Thuraya was active with Hamas.
Israel’s army claimed that the two journalists “were traveling in a vehicle with a terror operative who was operating a drone.”
The Israeli army told The Times of Israel that its military aircraft “identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft in a way that put [Israeli army] forces at risk.”
Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari told NBC News that the strike was “unfortunate” and that an investigation was ongoing.
NBC said that Thuraya, according to Al Jazeera’s managing editor, “was a freelance drone operator, who was part of a convoy of journalists including Hamza.”
The editor said that the journalists were not flying a drone at the time of Israel’s strike.
Al Jazeera condemned the attack on the journalists, stating that their assassinations reaffirm “the need to take immediate necessary legal measures against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity.”
Six press freedom and human rights groups sent a letter to US President Joe Biden this week, demanding that his administration “act immediately and decisively to promote the conditions for safe and unrestricted reporting on the hostilities” in Gaza.
“More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the hostilities than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year,” the letter states, citing statistics by the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the letter’s co-authors.