NGOs warn of ‘moral failure’ to protect citizens of Gaza

The international community has been accused by the head of a global humanitarian organisation of a “moral failure” to protect civilians in Gaza as Israel continues its intensive bombardment of the strip.

Speaking after a visit to Khan Younis’s European Hospital as Israeli tanks and troops entered the southern Gaza city, International Committee of the Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric said conditions in the coastal enclave were “beyond anything that anyone should be in a position to describe”.

“What shocked me most were the children, with atrocious injuries and at the same time having lost their parents with no-on looking after them,” she said in a video message.

Ms Spoljaric said the majority of people she had met in Gaza had been displaced several times. “[Some] have lost limbs because they needed to evacuate between treatments and they lost a hand or a foot because they couldn’t be treated in the hospital where they arrived first.”

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She called for solutions to be found for northern hospitals that had “lost [their] entire surgical capacity” and also pressed for a de-escalation of the conflict.

“The ICRC will do its utmost to help alleviate and reduce the suffering, but we can’t do this alone,” she said, adding that there must be “not only a humanitarian solution” but also a “political solution”.

Ms Spoljaric is not alone in urging concerted action to secure a ceasefire in the war. United Nations co-ordinator for humanitarian affairs Lynn Hastings said that since a pause in fighting expired last Friday and Israeli military operations expanded into the south and tens of thousands of civilians have been forced into “increasingly compressed spaces desperate to find food, water, shelter and safety”.

She reiterated the concerns raised by the international humanitarian community, saying, “nowhere is safe in Gaza and there is nowhere left to go”. Conditions for the delivery of aid did not exist, she added, warning that due to Israel’s expansion of the air and ground war to southern Gaza “an even more hellish scenario is about to unfold” to which humanitarian operations “may not be able to respond”.

The US government has a responsibility as a partner and ally of the Israeli government, to ensure that its support is not used to kill civilians

—  Avril Benoît

Speaking in Cairo, James Elder, a spokesman for the UN children’s agency, Unicef, warned from Cairo that, “so-called safe zones” for civilians identified by Israel were “not scientific, they are not rational, they are not possible”.” In a post on the social media platform X, he said, “Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured. Somehow, it’s getting worse for children and mothers.”

In an open letter to Joe Biden, the US executive director of the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières Avril Benoît, urged the US “to call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire in Gaza”.

Ms Benoît condemned the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7th, but said the way Israel was prosecuting the war “is causing massive death and suffering among Palestinian civilians and is inconsistent with international norms and laws”.

“The US government has a responsibility as a partner and ally of the Israeli government, to ensure that its support is not used to kill civilians, attack hospitals and medical staff, destroy cities and forcibly displace civilians,” Ms Benoît told the US president.

Human Rights Watch has released satellite imagery showing that orchards, farmland, and greenhouses in northern Gaza have been destroyed since Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began. In the north-east, “green agricultural land is now brown and desolate”, the agency reported. Fields planted with potatoes and citrus orchards had been damaged by fighting and ploughed by bulldozers for tank routes, it said.

In a post on X, HRW said, “As food systems collapse across Gaza, we are gravely concerned about the well-being of over two million Palestinians in Gaza who face hunger, food insecurity and loss of livelihood amid the Israeli blockade.”

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