The United Nations reports Palestinian children and women were the sole casualties in at least three dozen Israeli airstrikes against Gaza since mid-March, as it cautioned that Israel’s military campaign puts Palestinians’ “continued existence as a group” at risk.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated on Friday that the office has recorded 224 Israeli attacks on residential structures and tents housing displaced individuals in the Gaza Strip during March 18 and April 9.
“In some 36 attacks on which the UN Human Rights Office confirmed information, the deaths reported to date were all women and children,” she stated. The report comes as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed over 1,500 Palestinians since the Israeli army shattered a ceasefire in March, Palestinian Ministry of Health figures show.
Israel has also applied an overall siege on the coastal Palestinian pocket, causing the UN and human rights agencies to raise fears that food, water, medicine and other vital commodities are fast running out.
“Over a month has gone by and not a single drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies,”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres informed journalists in New York last week.
“As the aid has run dry, the gates of horror have swung open again. Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are trapped in a death loop without end.”
At least 15 Palestinians were killed in Gaza since Friday morning. The figures include 10 members of one family, seven of them children, killed during the bombing of a Khan Younis home in southern Gaza.
At the same time, numerous individuals have been buried under the debris throughout the territory due to Israeli shelling, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said from central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.
“We have heard extremely gruesome testimonies from civil defence teams reporting that while they were trying to rescue Palestinians buried under their collapsed houses,”
he said.
“They were hearing the cries of babies and the cry of children calling for help and screaming for any kind of rescue.
‘More dire than before’
Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the UN human rights office, stated that the situation in Gaza is “worse than it has ever been before”. Palestinians are being forcibly transferred to smaller and smaller spaces, she added. At the same time, Israeli military attacks persist, humanitarian aid is being denied, and Israeli officials are making assistance conditional on the release of captives in the enclave.
As we have stated today, in view of the cumulative effect of the conduct of the Israeli forces in Gaza, we are worried that Israel seems to be imposing on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life that are increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza,”
she said.
Israel has promised to continue its military campaign, with the authorities in recent days drawing up plans to capture new areas of ground in southern Gaza. The Israeli army has also begun to issue a series of evacuation orders.
The UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) reported that some 400,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced in Gaza since the ceasefire collapsed on March 18. “They are now also suffering by far the longest blockade of aid and commercial supplies since the war began,” UNRWA wrote in an X post calling for unobstructed humanitarian access.
