Netanyahu asks for Red Cross help to get aid to hostages in Gaza
Mr Netanyahu said on Sunday he had spoken with the organisation's regional head, Julien Lerisson.
There are 49 hostages believed still in Gaza, of whom 27 are believed dead.
In a post on X, Mr Netanyahu said he had requested Mr Lerisson's 'immediate involvement' in providing the hostages with food and medical treatment.
He also repeated his earlier claim that Palestinian people in Gaza are not suffering from starvation.
That comes despite reports from Palestinian health officials of more than 111 malnutrition-related deaths in the enclave and warnings from several of the world's largest aid organisations of a devastating humanitarian crisis.
'The lie of starvation propagated by Hamas is spreading worldwide, but the reality is that systematic starvation is being carried out against our hostages – men and women who are subjected to severe and cruel physical and psychological abuse,' his post said.
'The world cannot remain indifferent to the shocking images that are reminiscent of Nazi crimes.
'I demanded the involvement of the world's nations in condemning the terrorist organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and in halting all forms of support for them, direct or indirect.
'I emphasised to [Mr Lerisson] that the actions of these terrorist organisations violate international law and the Geneva Convention.'
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CBS News
3 hours ago
- CBS News
Injured children from Gaza arrive in Bay Area to get medical treatment
Late Wednesday afternoon, three injured children from Gaza landed at SFO along with their families. They came to the Bay Area to receive medical treatment for injuries sustained during the conflict. HEAL Palestine is the nonprofit group that helped facilitate the trip. Their mission is to help wounded children get out of Gaza and into hospitals across the US. It was an emotional and exciting welcome for the children and their families, greeted by volunteers and also the doctors who helped coordinate their treatment, like Dr. Mohammad Subeh. "Our goal is to provide them with the best care we can to give them the best opportunity at healing," Subeh said. He's an emergency room doctor in the South Bay and went to Gaza twice in the past few years as a health care volunteer. That's where he met 6-year-old Ghazal, 8-year-old Anas, and 14-year-old Leyan. "I haven't seen them for almost a year, and so this is a big reunion for me personally, not as their doctor but like as a very close friend," said All three children were injured in separate bombings in Gaza. Ghazal and Anas both sustained traumatic leg injuries, and Leyan dealing with severe burns and shrapnel embedded in her foot and leg. "Some of them have orthopedic injuries that really require multiple complex surgeries, rehabilitation, and as you can imagine with the annihilation of the health care infrastructure in Gaza, this is not possible. We cannot do this on the ground in Gaza," said Dr. Subeh. "The number of children currently in Gaza that need significant medical care is in the tens of thousands. So, it is absolutely not something that the health care system there can accommodate," said Talha Baqar with HEAL Palestine. The group helps children and their immediate family members were able to come to the US on medical visas. They find private donors to pay all the medical bills, plus host families who can offer places to stay near the hospitals. The first issue that will be addressed for all the kids is their malnutrition. "We have nutritionists and various other specialists on board to see how we can really give them the best chance at maximizing this treatment," said Dr. Subeh. In addition, the children will receive dental care and mental health services, plus will also have some much-needed downtime to just enjoy being kids. "All of them and all of their family members have never seen the world outside of Gaza, which is 2/3rds the size of the city of San Jose," said Dr. Subeh. The three children will all be treated at different hospitals. One will go to El Camino Hospital in Los Gatos, one to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, and another to Kaiser Oakland. Once their medical treatments are complete here in the US, HEAL Palestine will get them to Egypt, where they'll help them with housing and education.
Chicago Tribune
4 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Dozens killed seeking aid in Gaza as Israel weighs further military action
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — At least 38 Palestinians were killed overnight and into Wednesday in the Gaza Strip while seeking aid from United Nations convoys and sites run by an Israeli-backed American contractor, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said it had fired warning shots when crowds approached its forces. Another 25 people, including several women and children, were killed in Israeli airstrikes, according to local hospitals in Gaza. The military said it only targets Hamas. The latest deaths came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to announce further military action — and possibly plans for Israel to fully reoccupy Gaza. Experts say Israel's ongoing military offensive and blockade are already pushing the territory of some 2 million Palestinians into famine. A new U.N. report said only 1.5% of Gaza's cropland is accessible and undamaged. Another escalation of the nearly 22-month war could put the lives of countless Palestinians and around 20 living Israeli hostages at risk, and would draw fierce opposition both internationally and within Israel. Netanyahu's far-right coalition allies have long called for the war to be expanded, and for Israel to eventually take over Gaza, relocate much of its population and rebuild Jewish settlements there. U.S. President Donald Trump, asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he supported the reoccupation of Gaza, said he wasn't aware of the 'suggestion' but that 'it's going to be pretty much up to Israel.' Of the 38 Palestinians killed while seeking aid, at least 28 died in the Morag Corridor, an Israeli military zone in southern Gaza where U.N. convoys have been repeatedly overwhelmed by looters and desperate crowds in recent days, and where witnesses say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire. The Israeli military said troops fired warning shots as Palestinians advanced toward them, and that it was not aware of any casualties. Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies, said another four people were killed in the Teina area, on a route leading to a site in southern Gaza run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American contractor. The Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of six people killed near a GHF site in central Gaza. GHF said there were no violent incidents at or near its sites, and that the one in central Gaza was not open on Wednesday. It said the violence may have been related to the chaos around U.N. convoys. Two of the Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza City, in the north of the territory, killing 13 people there, including six children and five women, according to the Al-Ahli Hospital, which received the bodies. The Israeli military says it only targets fighters and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because its fighters are entrenched in heavily populated areas. Israel facilitated the establishment of four GHF sites in May after blocking the entry of all food, medicine and other goods for 2 1/2 months. Israeli and U.S. officials said a new system was needed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off humanitarian aid. The United Nations, which has delivered aid to hundreds of distribution points across Gaza throughout the war when conditions allow, has rejected the new system, saying it forces Palestinians to travel long distances and risk their lives for food, and that it allows Israel to control who gets aid, potentially using it to advance plans for further mass displacement. The U.N. human rights office said last week that some 1,400 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid since May, mostly near GHF sites but also along U.N. convoy routes where trucks have been overwhelmed by crowds. It says nearly all were killed by Israeli fire. This week, a group of U.N. special rapporteurs and independent human rights experts called for the GHF to be disbanded, saying it is 'an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law.' The experts work with the U.N. but do not represent the world body. The GHF called their statement 'disgraceful,' and urged the U.N. and other aid groups to work with it 'to maximize the amount of aid being securely delivered to the Palestinian people in Gaza.' The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots when crowds threatened its forces, and GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray and fired into the air on some occasions to prevent deadly crowding at its sites. Israel's air and ground war has destroyed nearly all of Gaza's food production capabilities, leaving its people reliant on international aid. A new report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.N. satellite center found that just 8.6% of Gaza's cropland is still accessible following sweeping Israeli evacuation orders in recent months. Just 1.5% is accessible and undamaged, it said. The military offensive and a breakdown in security have made it nearly impossible for anyone to safely deliver aid, and aid groups say recent Israeli measures to facilitate more assistance are far from sufficient. Hospitals recorded four more malnutrition-related deaths over the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 193 people, including 96 children, since the war began in October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Jordan said Israeli settlers blocked roads and hurled stones at a convoy of four trucks carrying aid bound for Gaza after they drove across the border into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Israeli far-right activists have repeatedly sought to halt aid from entering Gaza. Jordanian government spokesperson Mohammed al-Momani condemned the attack, which he said had shattered the windshields of the trucks, according to the Jordanian state-run Petra News Agency. The Israeli military said security forces went to the scene to disperse the gathering and accompanied the trucks to their destination. Hamas-led fighters killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted another 251. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals. Of the 50 still held in Gaza, around 20 are believed to be alive. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children. It is part of the now largely defunct Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source for the number of war casualties.
NBC News
8 hours ago
- NBC News
American doctors describe dire conditions at a Khan Younis hospital in Gaza
A pair of American volunteer doctors described to NBC News a barely coping hospital in Gaza, with bodies spread across the blood-smeared floors as medical staff struggled to treat hundreds of people who had been injured as they tried to access humanitarian aid. 'We have children who are dead on the floor and we are unable to move these patients just due to the sheer volume that we received,' Ahmed Farhat, an emergency physician from California, told NBC News in a video message Tuesday, talking about the situation at the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis. 'We have patients who are intubated on the floor with no sedation. We have patients who have chest tubes on the floor, patients who are bleeding out,' added Farhat, who is just under two weeks into a medical mission run by the Michigan-based Rahma Worldwide, a charity founded in 2014 that operates emergency response and humanitarian relief programs across the Middle East and Africa. His comments echo those of other doctors working in Gaza who in recent interviews with NBC News have lamented the lack of food and medicine being allowed into the enclave, amid international outrage over widespread starvation and deaths from malnutrition. Others have described aid distribution points as death traps, as a growing number of people have been killed or injured while seeking desperately needed food. Three short videos taken by Farhat in the Nasser Medical Complex on Tuesday showed dozens of people waiting for treatment on the hospital's floors. Some had tubes inserted to help them breathe, others were motionless. Citing hospital administration data, Farhat said in a text message on Wednesday that the Nasser Complex received 453 patients within a number of hours on Tuesday, and 48 of them had died. He added that his patients told him they had come under fire by Israeli forces while trying to collect aid from two sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the U.S. and Israel-backed organization that has been mired in controversy since replacing most United Nations-run relief operations in Gaza in May. In a statement to NBC News on Wednesday, the GHF, which operates four militarized food aid distribution sites across the enclave in areas where the Israeli military is active, said aid convoys belonging to the United Nations and other organizations in the past often passed near their locations and were regularly looted by large crowds. However, it said there were 'no incidents at or near' their sites on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) could not confirm whether its aid convoys had been looted near GHF sites. NBC News has reached out to the Israeli military for comment about the casualties at Nasser Hospital. Farhat said other patients had told him they had been fired upon in another incident near Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah while seeking aid from a United Nations aid convoy that was passing through. An OCHA spokesperson did not have any details about the specific event, but said such incidents are not uncommon. Separately, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Wednesday that 87 people had been killed and 570 injured in a series of incidents across the enclave on Tuesday. Travis Melin, an anesthesiologist from Oregon who also volunteers at the Nasser Hospital, said the number of patients on Tuesday had been 'huge.' In a text message Wednesday, he added that he had seen the highest number of casualties at the hospital during his monthlong tenure there. 'We're still doing emergency surgery on people who should have gone to the OR yesterday,' he said. The 'worst-case scenario of famine' is unfolding in the Gaza Strip under Israel's assault, the world's leading body on hunger said last week. Meanwhile, most of its residents have been driven from their homes and more than 61,000 killed, including thousands of children, according to local health officials. Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage. Nearly 1,400 people have been killed and more than 4,000 injured while seeking food, the United Nations' OCHA said in an update Tuesday. 'At least 859 people have been killed around GHF sites since the beginning of GHF's operations,' it added.
