Israel turns swaths of Gaza into ‘lifeless wastelands' as attacks intensify
Eight people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a residential home in Gaza City in northern Gaza, medical sources told Al Jazeera.
Two other people were killed in an Israeli attack on the city's Tuffah neighbourhood, hospital sources told Al Jazeera.
The killings come as Israel escalates its attacks on Gaza City, the largest city in the enclave, after the country's security cabinet approved plans for the military to seize the city, an operation that could forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones in southern Gaza.
The plan has received international condemnation from the United Nations and even dissent from within Israel's own military.
Al Jazeera correspondents reported on Thursday that large swaths of northern Gaza have been turned into 'lifeless wastelands' amid the Israeli escalation.
Palestinians in Gaza City have spoken of their fears of further displacement, following an Israeli forced evacuation order to areas further south, in advance of the proposed occupation.
Walaa Sobh said she had already been displaced during the war from the northern city of Beit Lahiya to Gaza City, and was unable to move again.
'We're afraid to move anywhere else, because we have nowhere to go, no income – and I am a widow,' she told Al Jazeera.
'If they want to force us out, then at least find us a place, give us tents, especially for the widows, the children, and the sick. You're not only displacing one or two people; you're displacing millions who have nowhere to stay.'
Another woman, Umm Sajed Hamdan, said she would refuse to follow the order.
'I am a mother of five and the wife of a detainee. I cannot escape with my children from one place to another,' Hamdan told Al Jazeera. 'I would rather face death here in Gaza City than go to al-Mawasi.'
Al Jazeera's senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said Israel's plans to occupy Gaza City are a serious cause for concern.
'It's a terrible escalation, really,' said Bishara.
'[Netanyahu] really intends to reoccupy Gaza … send the military in and just take it on again.'
The humanitarian consequences of Israel expanding its offensive in Gaza 'would be dire' for Palestinians who have already endured 22 months of displacement and bloodshed, Mohamed Elmasry, professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera.
'These are people who have been displaced – in many cases more than 10 times and in some cases more than 20 times already – and quite literally dodging bombs for the past 22 months,' Almasri said. 'And they are starving in addition to all that.'
Elmasry described the Israeli plan as part of a broader effort to push Palestinians out of Gaza.
'Israel wants to empty the Gaza Strip, and it wants at least all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,' he said.
Truce talks
As Israel continues to escalate attacks on Gaza City, Mossad spy chief David Barnea is visiting Qatar in an effort to revive talks over a Gaza ceasefire, two Israeli officials told the Reuters news agency on Thursday.
The visit follows a reported expression of positivity from Hamas officials to restart ceasefire negotiations during a meeting with Egypt's intelligence chief in Cairo earlier this week.
Earlier on Thursday, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said that a non-Israeli, peaceful civilian administration for Gaza was among the Israeli government's five key principles for ending the war.
The other principles include the release of captives still held in Gaza, the surrender of weapons by Hamas, the full demilitarisation of Gaza, and Israel retaining overriding security control, he said.
Aid still 'a drop in the ocean'
Meanwhile, more than 100 aid groups on Thursday accused Israel of obstructing life-saving aid from entering Gaza, resulting in vast quantities of relief supplies remaining stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt as more Palestinians starve.
'Despite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs [nongovernmental organisations] have been unable to deliver a single truck of life-saving supplies since 2 March,' the groups said.
There is aid sitting all around the boundary between Israel and Gaza that is not being allowed in, Natasha Davies, a nursing activity manager with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, told Al Jazeera.
'We've had a couple of trucks in [to Gaza], but really, it's just a drop in the ocean … We run primarily a trauma surgical hospital, so every single patient has a wound of some sort that needs fixing with supplies that we are intermittently receiving,' Davies said by videolink from Gaza's southern city of Khan Younis.
'It's just a humanitarian catastrophe. There are these GHF sites, which are slaughter masquerading as aid, which create mass casualty incidents, which create more injuries for us to treat with limited resources,' she said.
Basal Mahmoud, Gaza's civil defence spokesperson, told Al Jazeera Arabic that the aid currently entering the enclave is 'not sufficient at all'.
He said at least 1,000 trucks of various supplies are needed each day, adding that only about 100 trucks enter daily, most of them going to traders rather than meeting market needs.
Dr Munir al-Bursh, director of Gaza's Health Ministry, said Israel is starving to death 'all sorts of people', including children and women.
He warned that 40,000 children under one were suffering from malnutrition, 250,000 children under five face life-threatening food shortages, and 1.2 million children under 18 are living in severe food insecurity.
'We are facing overwhelming, frightening figures,' al-Bursh told Al Jazeera Arabic.
The accusations from aid groups came as United States President Donald Trump said he would like to see journalists gain access to Gaza to see humanitarian efforts. Israel has not allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza since the start of its war on the besieged enclave, unless they are under Israeli military escort.
'I would be very fine with journalists going,' Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. 'And it's a very dangerous position to be in, as you know, if you're a journalist, but I would like to see it.'
The total number of aid seekers killed since May 27, when Israel introduced a new aid distribution mechanism through the US-based GHF, has reached at least 1,881, with more than 13,863 injured, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
The total count of hunger-related deaths is now 239, including 106 children, the ministry records.
Israel's war on Gaza has killed at least 61,776 people and wounded 154,906. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023, attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.
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Maiduguri, Nigeria – Sometimes, it feels to Zara Ali as though her daughter was born already sick in the womb. On a recent weekday, the 30-year-old mother clutched the ill toddler in her lap as she sat outside a government hospital in Maiduguri, the capital of northeast Nigeria's Borno State. The two had just finished yet another doctor's appointment in hopes of curing the child. Although cranky as any other sick two-year-old, it is Amina's hair – brownish and seemingly bald in several spots – that's a visible sign of the malnourishment doctors had previously diagnosed. Yet, despite months of treatment with a protein-heavy, ready-to-eat paste, Ali says progress has been slow, and her daughter might require more hospital visits. 'She gets sick, gets a little better, and then falls ill again,' she said, frustrated. Already, Ali and her family have had to move homes several times because of the Boko Haram conflict. They were displaced from Damboa town, about 89km (55 miles) away, and now live in Maiduguri as displaced persons. Adding to her woes is the reduced access to care in recent months as several aid clinics she visits for free treatment have begun to scale back operations, or in some cases, completely shut their services. 'Honestly, their interventions were really helpful, and we need them to come back and help our children,' Ali said. Amina is only one of some five million children across northeast and northwest Nigeria suffering from malnourishment in what experts have called the region's most severe food crisis in years. The troubled northeast region has, for a decade and a half, been in the throes of a conflict waged by the armed group Boko Haram, and prolonged insecurity has disrupted food supplies. In the northwest, bandit groups are causing similar upheavals, resulting in a hunger crisis that state governments are struggling to contain. Compounding the problem this year are the massive, brutal funding cuts roiling aid organisations, which have often stepped in to help by providing food assistance to the 2.3 million displaced northeast Nigerians. Many of those organisations were dependent on funds from the United States, which, since February, has reduced contributions to aid programmes globally by about 75 percent. The World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations food aid agency and the world's largest provider of food assistance, was forced to shut down more than half of all its nutrition clinics across the northeast in August, Emmanuel Bigenimana, who leads northeast Nigeria operations, told Al Jazeera from the agency's site in Maiduguri. Some 300,000 children are cut off from needed nutrition supplements, he said. Already, in July, WFP doled out its last reserves of grains for displaced adults and families, Bigenimana added, standing by a row of half-empty tent warehouses. A few men removed grain sacks from the tents and loaded them onto trucks bound for neighbouring Chad, a country also caught in complex crises. For Nigeria, he said, which is in the lean season before harvest, there was no more food. Insecurity fuels food crisis Northeast Nigeria should be a food basket for the country, due to its fertile, savannah vegetation suitable for cultivating nuts and grains. However, since the Boko Haram conflict broke out, the food supply has dwindled. Climate shocks in the increasingly arid region have added to the problems. Boko Haram aims to control the territory and has been active since 2011. The group's operations are mainly in Borno, neighbouring states in the northeast, and across the border in Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. It gained global notoriety in 2014 for the kidnapping of female students in Chibok. Internal fractures and Nigeria's military response have reduced the group's capacity in recent years, but it still controls some territory, and a breakaway faction is affiliated with ISIL (ISIS). More than 35,000 people have been killed in attacks by the group, and more than 2 million are displaced. Before the insecurity, families in the region, particularly outside the urban metropolis of Maiduguri, survived on subsistence farming, tilling plots of land, and selling surplus harvest. These days, that is hardly an option. The military has hunkered down in garrisoned towns since 2019 to avoid troop losses. It is hard to find cultivating space amid the trenches and security barriers constructed in such places, security analyst Kabir Adamu of intelligence firm Beacon Consulting, told Al Jazeera. Those who venture outside the towns risk being targeted by armed fighters. In rural areas not under army control, Boko Haram operates as a sort of government, exploiting villagers to generate money. 'The armed actors collect taxes from them to use land for farming,' Adamu said, adding that for rural farmers, those taxes often prove heavy on the pockets. In more unlucky scenarios, farmers have been killed if they were believed to be military informants. In January, 40 farmers were executed in the town of Baga. Fishermen have similarly been targeted. The vicious cycle has repeated itself for years, and the compounding effect is the current food crisis, experts say. Just 45 minutes from Maiduguri, in Konduga town, farmer Mustapha Modu, 55, tilled the earth in anticipation of rainfall on a cool weekday. He had just returned from a short journey to Maiduguri, braving the risky highways to buy seedlings in hopes of a good season. Even as Modu planted, he worried that harvest might be impossible. There are widespread fears that Boko Haram fighters often lie in wait and then pounce on farmers to seize harvests. At one time, he said, his family of three wives and 17 children depended on handouts, but those hardly reached Konduga any more, so he had to do something. 'It's been a long time since we saw them in our village,' Modu said of food aid distributors. 'That's why I managed to go and get some seedlings, even though the insurgents are still on our neck.' Aid cuts risk more 'violence' The UN and its agencies were the focus of aid cuts from Washington in April, leading to the WFP receiving zero aid from the US this year, Bigenimana said. Like the US, other donors such as the European Union and the United Kingdom have also cut back on aid, instead diverting money to security as tensions remain high over Russia's war in Ukraine. The agency catered to some 1.3 million displaced people and others in hard-to-reach areas, fringe locations accessible only by helicopter. For children, the agency ran several nutrition clinics and supported government hospitals with ready-to-use food, a protein mixture made mostly of groundnut, which can rapidly stabilise a malnourished child. Funding cuts caused the WFP to begin rationing supplies in recent months. In July, resources in Nigeria were completely emptied. At least $130m is required for the agency to speedily get back on track with its operations here, Bigenimana said. Extended lack of support, he said, could push more people into danger. 'People are attempting to go and get firewood to sell outside the secure points,' the official said. 'Even when we delay distribution on normal days, people protest. So we are expecting that, and it could get violent.' Multiple other NGOs across the region were also hit by the Trump aid cuts. They not only provided food aid or nutrition treatment, but also medical services, and crucial vaccines children need in the first years of life to guard against infectious diseases like measles. Analysts like Adamu, however, criticise aid groups for what he said is their failure to create a system where people don't rely on food aid. In Borno, the state government has, since 2021, gradually shut down camps for internally displaced people and resettled some in their communities. The aim, the government argues, is to reduce dependency and restore dignity. However, the move faces widespread backlash as aid agencies and rights organisations point out that some areas are still unsafe, and that displaced people simply move to other camps. 'They should have supported the government on security reforms for the state,' Adamu argued. That, he said, would have been a more sustainable way of empowering people and would have eased the food crisis. Rain time, sick time For now, the food crisis looks set to continue, and children in particular appear to be bearing the brunt, especially as heavy rains arrive. Muhammad Bashir Abdullahi, an officer with medical aid group Doctors without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, told Al Jazeera that more malnourished children are being admitted to the organisation's nutrition facility in Maiduguri since early August. It is possible, he said, that the shuttered services in other organisations were contributing to the higher numbers. 'We used to admit 200 children weekly, but last week we admitted up to 400 children,' Abdullahi said. MSF, which is not dependent on US aid, has recorded more than 6,000 malnourished children in its Maiduguri nutrition centre since January. Typically, children receive the protein paste, or in acute cases, a special milk solution. Abdullahi said more children are likely to be admitted in the coming weeks. Back at the government hospital where Ali was seeking treatment for her daughter, another woman stopped outside the clinic with her children, twin baby boys. One of them was sick, the mother, 33-year-old Fatima Muhammad, complained, and is suffering from a swollen head. This is the third hospital she was visiting, as two other facilities managed by NGOs were overwhelmed. Unfortunately, her son had not been accepting the protein paste, a sign that medical experts say signals acute malnutrition. 'His brother is sitting and crawling already, but he still cannot sit,' Muhammad said, her face squeezed in a frown. She blamed herself for not eating enough during her pregnancy, although she hardly had a choice. 'I think that's what affected them. I just need help for my son, nothing more.'
