Israel says its military has encircled Gaza City as aid workers warn of 'catastrophic' situation
Reuters | Posted: November 2, 2023 8:24 AM | Last Updated: November 3, 2023
UN special rapporteurs issue statement warning Palestinians 'at grave risk for genocide,' demand ceasefire
THE LATEST:
- Israeli military says troops have encircled Gaza City, confirms 18 soldiers killed in Gaza in last week.
- U.A.E.'s president offers to treat injured Palestinian children.
- UN human rights office says refugee camp bombings may be war crimes.
- CBC News learns Canadians in Gaza unlikely to leave Thursday.
- Blinken of U.S. to visit, Biden suggests 'pause' needed in Gaza fighting.
- West Bank violence surges, more than 120 Palestinians killed since Oct. 7.
WARNING: This story contains some disturbing images.
Israeli forces on Thursday encircled Gaza City — the Gaza Strip's main city — in their assault on Hamas, the military said, but the Palestinian militant group resisted their drive with hit-and-run attacks from underground tunnels.
The city in the north of the Gaza Strip has become the focus of attack for Israel, which has vowed to annihilate the Islamist group's command structure and has told civilians to flee to the south.
"We're at the height of the battle," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. "We've had impressive successes and have passed the outskirts of Gaza City. We are advancing."
He gave no further details.
Amid heavy explosions in Gaza, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters his country's "troops completed the encirclement of Gaza City, which is the focal point of the Hamas terror organization."
Brigadier General Iddo Mizrahi, chief of Israel's military engineers, said troops were encountering mines and booby traps.
"Hamas has learned and prepared itself well," he said.
WATCH | Israeli ground operations push farther into Gaza:
Hamas challenges IDF's official death toll
Abu Ubaida, spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, said in a televised speech on Thursday that Israel's death toll in Gaza was much higher than the military had announced.
"Your soldiers will return in black bags," he said.
Israel has bombed Gaza by land, sea and air in its campaign to wipe out the Iran-backed Islamist group after its cross-border attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israel said Hamas gunmen killed 1,400 people, including several Canadians, and took more than 220 hostages.
The Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza says at least 9,061 Palestinians in the narrow coastal enclave, including 3,760 children, have been killed by Israeli strikes since Oct. 7.
The Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its totals, and the overall death toll includes a disputed total from an Oct. 17 explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza.
WATCH | Aid groups unable to assist Palestinians as supplies run out in Gaza:
Israel's latest strikes this week have included the heavily populated Jabalia refugee camp. Gaza's Hamas-run media office said at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the two hits on Tuesday and Wednesday, with 120 missing and at least 777 people hurt.
Israel, which accuses Hamas of hiding behind civilians, said it killed two Hamas military leaders in Jabalia.
With Arab countries increasingly vocal in their outrage at Israel's actions, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also expressed concern that Israel's "disproportionate attacks … could amount to war crimes."
U.A.E. offers to treat Palestinian children
The Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt was opened for limited evacuations for a second day under a Qatari-brokered deal aimed at letting some foreign-passport holders, their dependents and some wounded people out of the enclave.
Palestinian border official Wael Abu Mehsen said 400 foreign nationals would leave for Egypt via the Rafah crossing on Thursday after at least 320 were allowed through on Wednesday.
Another 60 critically injured Palestinians would also be allowed to leave, Mehsen said.
The United Arab Emirates said on Thursday it planned to treat 1,000 Palestinian children from Gaza without saying how they would leave the besieged enclave for the Gulf state.
U.A.E. state news agency WAM reported President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan had directed hospitals to treat children "accompanied by their families" from Gaza.
It was not immediately clear whether those children and their families would be able to leave Gaza under the deal to allow people through the Rafah crossing brokered by Qatar, which involved Israel and the United States.
Canadians in Gaza still waiting to leave
Canadians are not expected to be part of the list of individuals to leave Gaza on Thursday, a government source with direct knowledge of the situation told CBC News. The source asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
A Canadian who worked for an international organization did leave through Rafah on Wednesday, although they were not on the official list of some 450 Canadians in Gaza and West Bank who registered with the Canadian government. Global Affairs Canada (GAC) said earlier it wouldn't share more information concerning that person because of privacy considerations.
Officials in Ottawa are hopeful some Canadians can begin to leave on Friday, although GAC has previously said it cannot guarantee that every Canadian that wants to leave Gaza will be allowed to, nor could it guarantee the safety and security of those who choose to leave.
WATCH | Canadian shares his plight, frustration:
Desperate conditions at Gaza hospitals
Over a third of Gaza's 35 hospitals are not functioning, with many turned into impromptu camps for people displaced by the bombardment, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Hospitals, including Gaza's only cancer hospital, are struggling because of fuel shortages. Israel has refused to let humanitarian convoys bring in fuel, citing concern that Hamas fighters would divert it for military use.
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Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry, said the main power generator at the Indonesian Hospital was no longer functioning.
The hospital was switching to a backup generator but would no longer be able to power mortuary refrigerators and oxygen generators.
"If we don't get fuel in the next few days, we will inevitably reach a disaster," he said.
"The situation is beyond catastrophic," said the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, describing packed corridors and many medics who were themselves bereaved and homeless.
WATCH | Gaza's largest hospital overwhelmed after Israeli airstrikes:
A group of seven UN human rights experts, known as special rapporteurs, issued a statement in Geneva Thursday calling for a ceasefire.
"We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide," the statement said. "We demand a humanitarian ceasefire to ensure that aid reaches those who need it the most."
One of the signatories to the statement later told Reuters why the rapporteurs felt the term "risk of genocide" was appropriate.
"We are using the term 'risk of genocide' because the process that is [underway] is absolutely indiscriminate, affecting, in this case, more than two million people," said Pedro Arrojo Agudo, special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.
"And in this sense, I think we are facing a risk of genocide, effectively."
The Israeli mission to the UN in Geneva called the comments "deplorable and deeply concerning" and blamed Hamas for civilian deaths.
The International Criminal Court defines the crime of genocide as the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means, including imposing measures intended to prevent births or forcibly transferring children from one group to another.
'I think we need a pause': Biden
Though Western nations and the United States in particular have traditionally supported Israel, harrowing images of bodies in the rubble and the conditions inside Gaza have triggered appeals for restraint and street protests around the world.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to arrive Thursday for days of meetings with Israeli and Arab officials, a day after U.S. President Joe Biden said that he supports a humanitarian break in the fighting.
"I think we need a pause," Biden said at a Wednesday event in Minneapolis in response to an audience member who interrupted his speech. "A pause means give time to get the prisoners out."
White House officials have previously said a humanitarian pause to allow for humanitarian aid and the return of hostages is worth exploring but have rejected calls for a complete ceasefire, arguing such a move would benefit Hamas.
WATCH | Blinken says democracies have responsibility to protect civilians:
Violence in West Bank worsens
Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has surged since the start of the war in Gaza.
Vigilante-style attacks carried out by Israeli settlers have killed 29 Palestinians this year, according to OCHA. At least eight of those deaths occurred since Oct 7, the OCHA said, worrying ordinary Palestinians, Israeli security experts and Western officials.
This year was already the deadliest in at least 15 years for West Bank residents, with 200 Palestinians and 26 Israelis killed, according to United Nations data. But in the three weeks since the Hamas attack on Israel, a total of 121 West Bank Palestinians have been killed, according to the UN, although it was unclear how many of the deaths were the result of settler violence or raids by the Israel Defence Forces.
Settler-related violence is becoming harder to stem, Israeli security experts say.
"There's a great danger [from] extreme right activists in the West Bank," Lior Akerman, a former officer in Israel's Shin Bet internal security service, told Reuters.
Settlers are using the deployment of soldiers to Gaza and northern Israel, where troops are fighting the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, to wage unimpeded attacks, he said.
"The army is now even busier, which allows [settlers] to operate freely.
Washington has condemned settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank while the European Union on Tuesday denounced "settler terrorism" that risked a "dangerous escalation of the conflict."
LISTEN | Humanitarian crisis in Gaza: