Almost 10% of Gaza's under-fives acutely malnourished: UN

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 12 February 2024

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GENEVA - Almost one in 10 of Gazan children under five are now acutely malnourished, overwhelmingly as a result of Israel's war on the territory, according to initial U.N. data from arm measurements that show physical wasting.

Measurements of thousands of young children's and infants' arm circumferences showed that 9.6% were acutely malnourished, up about 12 times from pre-war levels, according to a note from the U.N. humanitarian office, OCHA.

In northern Gaza, the rate was 16.2%, or one in six.

The charity ActionAid said some Gazans were eating grass. "Every single person in Gaza is now hungry, and people have just 1.5 to 2 litres of unsafe water per day to meet all their needs," it said.

Hind Rajab, six, found dead in Gaza 12 days after cry for help

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 10 February 2024

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LONDON - “I’m so scared, please come,” were some of the last words six-year-old Hind Rajab said in a telephone call to rescuers after her family’s car came under fire in Gaza City.

Trapped in the vehicle and surrounded by her dead relatives, for three hours she pleaded with the Red Crescent to save her.

But the aid agency lost contact with the ambulance dispatched to her aid on 29 January and its crew and Hind remained missing.

Now Hind’s family has said that she was found dead inside the car in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City on Saturday morning.

“Hind and everyone else in the car is martyred,” her grandfather, Baha Hamada, told Agence France-Presse. “[Family members] were able to reach the area because Israeli forces withdrew early at dawn today.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) added that it had located its bombed-out ambulance just metres away, and that its two paramedics, Yusuf Al-Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, had also been killed.

Nebal Farsakh, PRCS spokesperson, said: “We have been in constant panic and fear over the last 12 days. We were unable to send anyone else to the area so we were uncertain regarding their fate. We wondered if they were dead or alive.

“Today, Hind’s family arrived at the location after the Israeli military withdrew from the area and they found her inside the car with her dead family beside her.”

Gaza City has been devastated by fighting between Israel and Hamas since the war broke out four months ago and Hind’s family had been hoping to seek shelter elsewhere.

The tragedy unfolded on 29 January, when Hind and her uncle, aunt, and cousins attempted to flee approaching Israeli forces and their car came under fire. Hind’s mother and older siblings had set off on foot.

The PRCS initially spoke to Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, who told them that her parents and siblings had been killed, adding: “They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me.” But the call was cut off by what sounded like gunfire.

The PRCS released an audio recording of the call and some of Hind’s subsequent three-hour phone conversation with dispatchers in which she pleaded for help, saying: “Come take me. You will come and take me?”

The dispatcher, Rana al-Faqeh, said Hind told her she was afraid of the dark and asked for someone to come and rescue her.

Farsakh said the Red Crescent felt “helpless” as they waited for three hours for their ambulance to be given permission to access the location.

She said: “We contacted the ministry of health and they coordinated our safe access with the Israeli authorities. We were given the green light to move the ambulance.”

But she said the ambulance came under fire soon after it arrived at the location. “First [the paramedics] said the Israeli forces are putting laser lights on them … And then we heard a gunfire sound before we lost the connection. It was like a gunfire or explosion, we were not sure of what happened.”

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The PRCS had been appealing for information about the paramedics and Hind for days, posting photos of the trio on their social media accounts. On Saturday, it posted photographs of the bombed-out ambulance it said its two paramedics had been travelling in.

Farsakh said the ambulance was found metres away from Hind’s family’s car. “We have very clear red cross emblems on top of all of our ambulances,” she said. “This is horrible because when we have waited so many hours, leaving Hind appealing to us, crying, saying please come pick me up, and then, unfortunately, although we have waited all of these hours to guarantee our safe access, it wasn’t a safe access.”

The PRCS accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance. “The occupation deliberately targeted the Red Crescent crew despite prior coordination to allow the ambulance to arrive at the site to rescue Hind,” it said in a statement.

The Guardian has contacted the Israel Defense Forces for comment.

31 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes in Rafah

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 10 February 2024

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RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli airstrikes killed at least 31 Palestinians in Rafah early Saturday, hours after Israel’s prime minister said he asked the military to plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from the southern Gaza city ahead of a ground invasion.

Benjamin Netanyahu did not provide details or a timeline, but the announcement set off widespread panic. More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are packed into Rafah, many after being uprooted repeatedly by Israeli evacuation orders that now cover two-thirds of Gaza’s territory. It’s not clear where they could run next.

Word of the invasion plans capped a week of increasingly public friction between Netanyahu and the Biden administration. U.S. officials have said an invasion of Rafah without a plan for the civilian population would lead to disaster.

Israel has carried out airstrikes in Rafah almost daily, even after telling civilians in recent weeks to seek shelter there from ground combat in the city of Khan Younis, just to the north.

Overnight into Saturday, three airstrikes on homes in the Rafah area killed 28 people, according to a health official and Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies arriving at hospitals. Each strike killed multiple members of three families, including a total of 10 children, the youngest 3 months old.

Fadel al-Ghannam lost his son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren in one of the strikes. Standing amid the rubble, he said the strike tore the bodies of his loved ones to shreds.

He feared even worse, with the looming ground invasion of Rafah, and said the world’s silence has enabled Israel to proceed. “To this day, the world has not been fair to us and given us our rights,” he said.

Later Saturday, another strike killed three senior officers in the civil police, according to Rafah city officials.

In Khan Younis, the focus of the current ground combat, Israeli forces opened fire at Nasser Hospital, the area’s largest, killing at least two people and wounding five, according to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said medical staff are no longer able to move between the facility’s buildings because of the intense fire. He said 300 medical personnel, 450 patients and 10,000 displaced people are sheltering in the hospital.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

A RIFT WITH WASHINGTON

The steadily climbing Palestinian death toll — now over 28,000 after four months of war, according to Gaza health officials — has contributed to the friction between Netanyahu and Washington.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for civilian deaths because it fights from within civilian areas, but U.S. officials have pushed back, calling for more surgical strikes. President Joe Biden said this week Israel’s response is “over the top.”

Israel says that Rafah, which borders Egypt, is the last remaining Hamas stronghold in Gaza after more than four months of war.

“It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” Netanyahu’s office said Friday. “On the contrary, it is clear that intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians evacuate the areas of combat.”

It said he had ordered the military and security officials to come up with a “combined plan” that included both a mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of Hamas’ forces in the town.

It remains unclear where civilians can go. The Israeli offensive has caused widespread destruction, especially in northern Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of people do not have homes to return to.

In addition, Egypt has warned that any movement of Palestinians across the border into Egypt would threaten the four-decade-old peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which is mostly closed, serves as the main entry point for humanitarian aid.

Rafah had a prewar population of roughly 280,000, and according to the United Nations is now home to some 1.4 million additional people living with relatives, in shelters or sprawling tent camps after fleeing fighting elsewhere in Gaza.

NORTHERN GAZA

Israel declared war after several thousand Hamas militants burst across the border into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 others hostage.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that the bodies of 117 people killed in Israeli airstrikes were brought to Gaza hospitals over the past 24 hours, raising the overall death toll from the air and ground offensive to 28,064, mostly women and children. The ministry said more than 67,000 people have been wounded over the past four months.

Roughly 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, and the territory has plunged into a humanitarian crisis with shortages of food and medical services.

Netanyahu has said the war will only end with “total victory” for Israel, including crushing Hamas, a goal that is even viewed by some in Israel as unattainable.

Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years, since overrunning the territory in 2007, and has deep roots. Before the war, it ran a government apparatus with tens of thousands of civil servants and civil police.

In recent weeks, some Hamas policemen emerged in areas of northern Gaza from where Israeli forces had withdrawn, with the group saying they were determined to crack down on looting of abandoned properties and price-gouging.

Residents and first responders pulled bodies from the rubble of areas in western Gaza City from where troops had withdrawn earlier this week.

“The entire area has turned into rubble,” said Assad Radwan, a Gaza City resident who lives close to Shifa Hospital, the strip’s biggest. “Most of Gaza (city) has become unrecognizable for its own people.”

In the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, two medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent were found dead Saturday, after having gone missing 12 days ago. The medics had rushed to rescue 6-year-old Hind Rajab, who was traveling with her family in a car at the time to heed evacuation orders. The PRC had previously released an audio recording of a phone call from Hind’s cousin to a relative, saying the car had come under fire from a tank and that only she and Hind had survived. Hind’s cousin went silent mid-call.

The two medics were found in a destroyed ambulance near the family’s car. Hind and the rest of her family were also found dead. The PCR said the rescue mission had been coordinated with the Israeli military, which had no comment Saturday.

In a sign of resilience, hundreds of people gathered Friday for outdoor prayers amid the destruction of the urban refugee camp of Jebaliya in northern Gaza. Friday prayers are the highlight of the Muslim religious week, and the mass gathering marked the first such service since the start of the war.