Middle East conflict
UN: Number of civilians killed in Gaza ‘increasing rapidly’
A Palestinian inspects a destroyed house in Rafah, southern Gaza, after an Israeli airstrike. photo
© Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
The Israeli military has expanded its operations to the south of the Gaza Strip. The United Nations complains about a rapid increase in the number of civilian deaths.
The expansion of Israeli attacks in the south of the Gaza Strip is leading to, according to the United Nations on increasing number of deaths among the civilian population. “The number of civilians killed is increasing rapidly,” wrote the Commissioner General of the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, in a statement. Civilians, including women, children, the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities, are the main victims of the war. With the resumption of the military operation and its expansion in the south, “the horrors of the past few weeks are being repeated,” lamented Lazzarini.
The bombardment by Israeli forces continues after another evacuation order was issued to move people from the city of Khan Yunis to Rafah. “This order caused panic, fear and unrest,” it said. At least 60,000 more people have been forced to move to already overcrowded UNRWA shelters, and more are asking for protection, Lazzarini continued. Many of the people had already fled the war several times to other parts of the sealed off area.
Lazzarini: No place in Gaza is safe
The evacuation order pushes people to less than a third of the Gaza Strip. “They need everything: food, water, shelter and, above all, safety. The roads to the south are blocked,” it said. Claims that the United Nations has thousands of tents and plans to open new refugee camps in Rafah are false, the UN official said. No place in Gaza is safe, neither in the south nor in the southwest, neither in Rafah nor in any designated “safe zone.”
The Israeli army has activated an evacuation map that divides the Gaza Strip into hundreds of small zones to inform civilians about combat zones. However, critics complain that many people do not have electricity or internet to view the map. Many people don’t know how to deal with it either. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled there from the north of the area on Israel’s instructions are crowding south of Gaza.
The war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, carried out by terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups on October 7th in Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip. As a result, more than 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side, including at least 850 civilians.
According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, almost 15,900 people have now been killed in the Israeli counterattacks. The number of victims cannot currently be independently verified, but the United Nations and other observers point out that the authority’s figures have proven to be overall credible in the past.