Palestinians are living through “unspeakable horrors” in the north of the Gaza Strip, the United Nations’ top aid official said on Saturday, October 19, as she insisted that “these atrocities must stop”. Israel, vowing to stop Hamas militants from regrouping in northern Gaza, launched a major air and ground assault on October 6, tightening its siege on the war-battered area and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing.
“Appalling news from northern Gaza where Palestinians continue to endure unspeakable horrors under siege by Israeli forces,” the UN’s acting humanitarian chief Joyce Msuya said on X. “In Jabaliya, people are trapped under the rubble and first responders are blocked from reaching them,” she added. “Tens of thousands of Palestinians are being forcibly displaced. Essential supplies are running out. Hospitals, overwhelmed with patients, have been hit. “These atrocities must stop.”
Gaza’s civil defense agency on Saturday said a sweeping Israeli military operation had killed more than 400 people in two weeks in the north. Gaza’s health ministry said two patients at the north’s Indonesian Hospital died during a siege by Israeli forces on Saturday, while Israel’s military reported its troops were operating in the area. Since dawn, Israeli forces had surrounded and shelled the facility, Gaza health officials said.
‘Nowhere to go’
The head of the World Health Organization said the Indonesian Hospital’s generator was hit, leaving it without electricity, “resulting in the death of two critical patients”. “Hostilities in the vicinity of hospitals can quickly make them non-functional by compromising access. We cannot request any more loudly: health care must be protected,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
He said the WHO was planning a mission to the north’s Kamal Adwan hospital on Sunday to deliver fuel, medical supplies, blood and food, and to transfer critical patients to Al-Shifa hospital. “It is vital that Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda hospitals remain operational,” he said, calling for safe and sustained access to patients and health workers in need, and an immediate ceasefire.
Muhannad Hadi, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said that in the past fortnight, “Israeli forces increased their pressure” on the Indonesian and Al-Awda hospitals “to be evacuated, but patients had nowhere to go”.
He said Kamal Adwan was treating two-thirds of the more than 370 hospital patients in northern Gaza, most of whom are trauma cases, despite the facility running “critically low” on beds, medicine, supplies and fuel.
Since Friday, an urgent request from the UN to access north Gaza to help in rescuing “dozens of injured people trapped in rubble remains unfulfilled by Israeli forces”. “Every minute counts and these delays are life-threatening,” he said.
‘Collective punishment’
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also called on Israeli forces “to immediately stop their attacks on hospitals in north Gaza”. “This is purely and simply a collective punishment imposed on Palestinians in Gaza, who must choose between being forcibly displaced from the north or killed. We fear that this will not stop,” said Anna Halford, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza. “Israel’s allies bear a heavy responsibility for this dire situation, caused by their unwavering support for the war,” she added.
The conflict was sparked by the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel last year that resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures. Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas and bring back the hostages taken has killed 42,519 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN considers reliable.