A senior Palestinian diplomat to the United Nations has sounded alarm over Israel’s ongoing siege of northern Gaza, in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed over the last week and hundreds of thousands of civilian residents are either trapped or ordered to flee amid intense bombardment.
As the military siege in the Jabalia refugee camp and its vicinity entered its 10th day on Sunday, Palestinian authorities said at least 200 people have been killed since the Israeli operations began earlier this month.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that at least 17 more people were killed on Sunday morning in central and northern Gaza, including eight members of one family in the Nuseirat refugee camp as well as five people in al-Ettesalat area west of the Jabalia refugee camp.
“What is happening in northern Gaza now is a genocide within the genocide,” Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya, the deputy permanent observer to the UN, wrote on X.
‘Continuation of genocidal acts’
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said about 400,000 Palestinians are trapped in northern Gaza, with the Israeli military not allowing anyone to leave the area despite issuing an evacuation order.
“What’s happening now is a continuation of the genocidal acts that began a year ago,” he said, adding that more than 70 bodies are still on the streets, with civil defence workers unable to retrieve them because of relentless Israeli attacks.
In Jabalia, desperate residents are posting about their dire situation on social media with one declaring, “We will not leave, we die and we don’t leave.”
Nasser, a resident of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, said: “As the world is focused on Lebanon and possible Israeli strike against Iran, Israel is wiping out Jabalia.
“The occupation is blowing up roads and destroying residential districts. People can’t find anything to eat. They are trapped inside their homes, fearing bombs could fall onto their heads.”
A statement by the Israeli military on Sunday said 40 targets were hit in Gaza in the last 24 hours, claiming that the strikes destroyed weapons and killed dozens of Hamas fighters.
Among the reported deaths in the strikes on Sunday was a person killed after Israeli warplanes struck a gathering east of Deir el-Balah, Wafa reported. Israeli artillery shelling also killed three Palestinians and injured several others in the Bureij refugee camp, the report added.
Explosions were also heard from the Israeli army’s demolition of dozens of homes in Jabalia and its surroundings, particularly in the al-Safatay and al-Tuwam neighbourhoods, according to Wafa.
Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera that Israel has “prevented the entry of food supplies to the north for 10 days”, describing what is happening in Jabalia as “a crime against humanity”.
Intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Meanwhile, six Palestinians, most of them children, were injured when the Israeli military bombed a home in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City, Wafa said.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory, accused Israel of committing “another massacre”, adding that its troops “have accepted to be willing executioners of a genocidal plan”.
“It blows my mind to think that WE KNOW what Israel is doing and altogether we cannot stop it. Looking at where we were 100 years ago, no much progress has been achieved,” she said in a post on X.