Battle rages at Al Shifa Hospital as UN reports ‘catastrophic’ hunger in Gaza
- 19 Mar 2024
Fighting raged Monday in and around the besieged Gaza Strip’s largest hospital complex where Israel said its forces killed and arrested Hamas members, as Palestinians fled by foot under heavy bombardment.
While the army launched the overnight raid at Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital, the Israeli government sent the head of its Mossad spy agency to Qatar for renewed talks toward a ceasefire and hostage release deal.
The devastating war since Oct.7 attack on Israel has left roughly half of Gazans — around 1.1 million people — experiencing “catastrophic” hunger, a UN-backed food security assessment warned.
The expert report is “exhibit A for the need for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, decrying an “entirely man-made disaster.” “We must act now to prevent the unthinkable, the unacceptable and the unjustifiable,” he said.
Half of Gazans are experiencing “catastrophic” hunger, with famine projected to hit the north of the territory by May without urgent intervention, a United Nations-backed food security assessment warned on Monday.
“People in Gaza are starving to death right now. The speed at which this man-made hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is terrifying,” the head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) Cindy McCain said.
“To have 50 percent of an entire population in catastrophic, near-famine levels, is unprecedented,” Beth Bechdol, the deputy director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told AFP. This amounts to around 1.1 million people “struggling with catastrophic hunger and starvation”, according to the WFP. It added: “This is the highest number of people ever recorded as facing catastrophic hunger” under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership, which published its latest report on Monday.
Hours into the operation, Israel urged people to evacuate from the neighbourhood around the territory’s biggest medical centre, a complex crowded with patients and displaced people. The latest military operation involving Al Shifa triggered alarm from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
“We are terribly worried about the situation at Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Hospitals should never be battlegrounds.”
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said nearby residents had reported dozens of casualties who could not be helped “due to the intensity of gunfire and artillery shelling.” An AFP journalist witnessed air strikes on buildings in the area around Al Shifa and reported seeing “hundreds of people, mostly children, women, and the elderly, fleeing their homes.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Israel’s military campaign had turned long-blockaded Gaza from the world’s “greatest open-air prison” into its biggest “open-air graveyard,” and that Israel was using famine as a “weapon of war.”
As the fighting flared around Al Shifa, elsewhere in Gaza City a massive crowd gathered at a UN food distribution centre to collect bags of flour. “There’s nothing to eat or drink. Children are dying,” said resident Umm Omar Al Masharwai.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which operates the facility and coordinates nearly all aid to Gaza, has faced funding cuts since Israel accused about a dozen of its employees of involvement in the Oct.7 attack.
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said Monday he intended to visit Gaza but had been denied entry by “Israeli authorities,” a claim Israel did not immediately comment on.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of “starving children to death” in its siege of the Gaza Strip, and humanitarian charity Oxfam said Israel was “systematically and deliberately” blocking aid.
Global concern has focussed on Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians now live, many of them in crowded shelters and tent cities near the Egyptian border.
Repeated Israeli warnings of a looming ground invasion have raised fears of an even worse humanitarian catastrophe.
Mediation efforts toward a truce were expected to resume, following a week-long ceasefire in November.
A meeting in Qatar between Israel’s Mossad spy chief, David Barnea, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Egyptian officials “is expected to take place today”, a source close to the talks said.
Agence France-Presse