Cholera and gastroenteritis spread rapidly due to Gaza’s congestion.
Humanitarian Conditions in Gaza
Near Collapse as Israeli Attacks Intensify
Al Jazeera
(December 7, 2023) — Israel’s widening air and ground offensive in southern Gaza has displaced tens of thousands more Palestinians and worsened the territory’s already dire humanitarian conditions, with the fighting preventing the distribution of food, water and medicine outside a sliver of southern Gaza and new military evacuation orders squeezing people into ever-smaller areas of the south.
As the focus of the ground offensive moves down the Gaza Strip and into the second-largest city of Khan Younis, it is further shrinking the area where Palestinians can seek safety and pushing large numbers of people, many of whom have been forced to flee multiple times, towards the sealed-off border with Egypt.
While Israeli forces ordered residents to evacuate Khan Younis, much of the city’s population remains in place, along with large numbers who were displaced from northern Gaza and are unable to leave or are wary of fleeing to the disastrously overcrowded far south.
Doctors examine an injured Palestinian child, brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital following an Israeli assault on al-Maghazi refugee camp in Deir el-Balah, Gaza. [Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images]
The United Nations says some 1.87 million people — more than 80 percent of the population of 2.3 million — have already fled their homes. Almost the entire population is now crowded into southern and central Gaza, dependent on aid.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that public order in Gaza could soon break down amid the complete collapse of the humanitarian system.
“The situation is fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region. Such an outcome must be avoided at all costs.”
Bushra Khalidi, a Ramallah-based legal expert and rights campaigner with international aid charity Oxfam, warned that Israel’s push to relocate Palestinians in Gaza to a small area in the south is making it impossible to deliver aid and driving up the risk of disease.
“Squeezing people into a space that is basically as big as London’s Heathrow airport … is inhumane and makes it impossible to distribute aid to people,” Khalidi told Al Jazeera. “Gaza was already overpopulated … [now] we’re talking about 1.8 million people in an airport.”
Khalidi added that cholera and gastroenteritis are rapidly spreading due to the congested conditions.
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 16,248 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll stands at about 1,200.
Families mourn their dead in Gaza’s hospitals.
Displacement, Death, Hunger as
Israel’s War on Gaza Enters Third Month
Al Jazeera
(December 7, 2023) — Fighting has escalated in Gaza’s second-largest city of Khan Younisas Israeli air strikes rain down throughout the enclave, forcing Palestinians to flee to increasingly crammed pockets of the territory’s southern edge where there is no promised security, as the war enters its third month.
“We are talking about a carpet bombardment of entire neighbourhoods and residential blocks,” Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah in southern Gaza, said on Thursday, following heavy overnight shelling there.
The Israeli army “ordered with a threatening tone to move to Rafah because it is safe”, he said, but residential homes “were destroyed”.
“[These strikes] are not concentrated in one area of Rafah … multiple locations were targeted, just sending waves of fear and concern that confirm what people have talked about and expressed before – there is literally no safe place in the Gaza Strip, including the areas Israel designated as safe.”
After more than two months of war, starting on October 7, Mahmoud said that “the mood of these more than 60 days has been death, destruction and displacement”.
“We’re talking about more than 60 days of constant movement and running for their lives from one place to another, from the extreme northern part of the Gazan city of Beit Hanoon to the extreme south by Rafah, where many people are being packed and squeezed.”
Fighting rages as Israeli troops ‘carpet bomb entire neighborhoods’
‘Alarming Levels of Hunger’
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said that households in northern Gaza are “experiencing alarming levels of hunger”.
At least 97 percent of households in northern Gaza have “inadequate food consumption”, with nine out of 10 people going one full day and night without food.
In the southern governorates, a third of the households have reported high levels of severe or very severe hunger, with 53 percent experiencing moderate hunger.
“Palestinians lack everything they need to survive,” Mahmoud said.
While pursuing its offensive in the south, Israeli armed forces have attacked several refugee camps, among them the Jabalia camp in the north and the al-Maghazi camp in the centre. The attack in Jabalia killed 22 relatives of Al Jazeera journalist Momin Alshrafi, including his father, mother, three siblings, and children.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, 60 percent of the wounded require urgent medical treatment abroad, pointing to the collapse of the health sector in Gaza.
“The occupation forces are deliberately arresting and abusing the sick and wounded, including paramedics from our crews, and we are on the cusp of a health and environmental catastrophe in the Strip,” a statement said.
When Will It End?
As the death toll mounts amid the humanitarian catastrophe, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s war cabinet last week that the administration of US President Joe Biden believed the war should end in weeks – not months, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Israeli officials, in turn, expressed an interest in a return to normalcy, especially in the interest of economic stability, but did not make any guarantees, the report said.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel could indefinitely occupy part of the Gaza Strip to create a “buffer zone”, a move that would put him on a collision course with regional allies and the United States.
Conflicting reports have also emerged on whether Israeli troops have surrounded the house of Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, in Khan Younis.
Late on Wednesday, Netanyahu said it was “just a matter of time until we get him” and that Israeli soldiers had encircled his house.
Yet, military spokesperson Daniel Hagari later said Sinwar’s home is the entire “Khan Younis area”, giving no indication that a specific location had been surrounded.
Three names top Israel’s most-wanted men, namely Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades; his second-in-command, Marwan Issa; and Sinwar.
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