Baby girl killed with her parents in Gaza airstrike
'Two and a half months, what has she done?' neighbour Fathi Shubeir said. 'They are civilians in an area designated safe.'
Israel's military said it is dismantling Hamas's military capabilities and takes precautions not to harm civilians. It said it could not comment on the strike without more details.
Muwasi is one of the heavily populated areas in Gaza where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel plans to widen its coming military offensive.
The mobilisation of forces is expected to take weeks, and Israel may be using the threat to pressure Hamas into releasing more hostages taken in its October 7 2023 attack that sparked the war.
Families of hostages fear the coming offensive further endangers the 50 hostages remaining in Gaza, just 20 of them thought to be alive.
They and other Israelis were horrified by the recent release of videos showing emaciated hostages, speaking under duress, pleading for help and food.
A group representing the families has urged Israelis onto the streets on Sunday.
'Across the country, hundreds of citizen-led initiatives will pause daily life and join the most just and moral struggle: the struggle to bring all 50 hostages home,' it said in a statement.
The United Nations is warning that levels of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at their highest since the war began. Palestinians are drinking contaminated water as diseases spread, while some Israeli leaders continue to talk openly about the mass relocation of people from Gaza.
Another 11 malnutrition-related deaths occurred in Gaza over the past 24 hours, the territory's health ministry said on Saturday, with one child among them. That brings malnutrition-related deaths during the war to 251.
The UN and partners say getting aid into the territory of more than two million people, and then on to distribution points, remains highly challenging with Israeli restrictions and pressure from crowds of hungry Palestinians.
The UN human rights office says at least 1,760 people were killed while seeking aid between May 27 and Wednesday.
It says 766 were killed along routes of supply convoys and 994 in the vicinity of 'non-UN militarised sites', a reference to the Israeli-backed and US-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which since May has been the primary distributor of aid in Gaza.
Elsewhere, a 20-year-old Palestinian woman described as being in a 'state of severe physical deterioration' has died after being transferred to Italy for treatment, a hospital said on Saturday.
The patient was admitted to Pisa University Hospital late on Wednesday and died on Friday. She was removed from Gaza as part of a humanitarian mission and arrived with a 'with a very complex, compromised clinical picture', according to the hospital.
She died after entering a respiratory crisis and subsequently going into cardiac arrest, the hospital said in a statement.
Hospital staff had performed tests and started supportive therapy before she died, the statement said.
The woman, named by Italian media as Marah Abu Zuhri, had arrived in Italy with her mother.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said almost 120 Gazans – 31 patients and their families – had been flown to Rome, Milan and Pisa on three planes.
In a post on X, Mr Tajani said it was the 14th medical evacuation of Palestinians that Italy had conducted since January 2024, and the largest.
The hospital did not specify whether the woman had suffered from malnutrition, but said that she had arrived in a 'state of severe physical deterioration.'
The Hamas-led attack in 2023 killed around 1,200 people in Israel. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed 61,897 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry, which does not specify how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The UN and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: 'We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.' More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance 'one of the most urgent global health threats'. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago. The thing to remember is that antibiotics are quite unlike other medicines. Most drugs work by manipulating human biology: paracetamol relieves your headache by dampening the chemical signals of pain; caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and as a result prevents drowsiness taking hold. Antibiotics, meanwhile, target bacteria. And, because bacteria spread between people, the challenge of resistance is social: it's as if every time you took a painkiller for your headache, you increased the chance that somebody else might have to undergo an operation without anaesthetic. That makes resistance more than simply a technological problem. But like that British doctor in 1954, we still often talk as if it is: we need to invent new 'weapons' to better defend ourselves. What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can't help thinking about another natural resource that helped create the modern world but has also been dangerously overused: fossil fuels. Just as Earth's geological forces turned dead plants from the Carboniferous era into layers of coal and oil that we could burn for energy, so evolution created molecules that scientists in the 20th century were able to recruit to keep us alive. Both have offered an illusory promise of cheap, miraculous and never-ending power over nature – a promise that is now coming to an end. If we thought of antibiotics as the 'fossil fuels' of modern medicine, might that change how we use them? And could it help us think of ways to make the fight against life-threatening infections more sustainable? The antibiotic era is less than a century old. Alexander Fleming first noticed the activity of a strange mould against bacteria in 1928, but it wasn't until the late 1930s that the active ingredient – penicillin – was isolated. A daily dose was just 60mg, about the same as a pinch of salt. For several years it was so scarce it was worth more than gold. But after production was scaled up during the second world war, it ended up costing less than the bottle it came in. This abundance did more than tackle infectious diseases. Just as the energy from fossil fuels transformed society, antibiotics allowed the entire edifice of modern medicine to be built. Consider surgery: cutting people open and breaking the protective barrier of the skin gives bacteria the chance to swarm into the body's internal tissues. Before antibiotics, even the simplest procedures frequently resulted in fatal blood poisoning. After them, so much more became possible: heart surgery, intestinal surgery, transplantation. Then there's cancer: chemotherapy suppresses the immune system, making bacterial infections one of the most widespread complications of treatment. The effects of antibiotics have rippled out even further: they made factory farming possible, both by reducing disease among animals kept in close quarters, and by increasing their weight through complex effects on metabolism. They're one of the reasons for the huge increase in meat consumption since the 1950s, with all its concomitant welfare and environmental effects. Despite the crisis of resistance, antibiotics remain cheap compared with other medicines. Partly – as with fossil fuels – this is because the negative consequences of their use (so-called externalities) are not priced in. And like coal, oil and gas, antibiotics lead to pollution. One recent study estimated that 31% of the 40 most used antibiotics worldwide enter rivers. Once they're out there, they increase levels of resistance in environmental bacteria: one study of soil from the Netherlands showed that the incidence of some antibiotic-resistant genes had increased by more than 15 times since the 1970s. Another source of pollution is manufacturing, particularly in countries such as India. In Hyderabad, where factories produce huge amounts of antibiotics for the global market, scientists have found that the wastewater contains levels of some antibiotics that are a million times higher than elsewhere. Like the climate crisis, antibiotic resistance has laid global inequalities bare. Some high-income countries have taken steps to decrease antibiotic use, but only after benefiting from their abundance in the past. That makes it hard for them to take a moral stand against their use in other places, a dilemma that mirrors the situation faced by post-industrial nations urging developing nations to forgo the economic benefits of cheap energy. This may be where the similarities end. While we look forward to the day when fossil fuels are phased out completely, that's clearly not the case with antibiotics, which are always going to be part of medicine's 'energy mix'. After all, most deaths from bacterial disease worldwide are due to lack of access to antibiotics, not resistance. What we are going to need to do is make our approach to development and use much more sustainable. Currently, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new antibiotics: it's hard to imagine a more perfect anti-capitalist commodity than a product whose value depletes every time you use it. That means we need alternative models. One proposal is for governments to fund an international institute that develops publicly owned antibiotics, rather than relying on the private sector; another is to incentivise development with generously funded prizes for antibiotic discovery. And to address the issue of overuse, economists have suggested that health authorities could run 'subscription' models that remove the incentive to sell lots of antibiotics. In one pilot scheme in England, two companies are being paid a set amount per year by the NHS, regardless of how much of their product is actually used. Finally, we have to remember that antibiotics aren't the only game in town. Supporting other, 'renewable' approaches means we get to use the ones we do have for longer. Vaccines are vital to disease prevention – with every meningitis, diphtheria or whooping cough vaccine meaning a potential course of antibiotics forgone. And the 20th century's largest reductions in infectious disease occurred not because of antibiotics, but thanks to better sanitation and public health. (Even in the 2000s, the threat of MRSA was addressed with tried-and-tested methods such as handwashing and cleaning protocols – not new antibiotics.) Given that antibiotics themselves emerged unexpectedly, we should also be investing more in blue-skies research. Just as we no longer burn coal without a thought for the consequences, the era of carefree antibiotic use is now firmly in the past. In both cases, the idea that there wouldn't be a reckoning was always an illusion. But as with our slow waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, coming to appreciate the limits of our love affair with antibiotics may ultimately be no bad thing. Liam Shaw is a biologist at the University of Oxford, and author of Dangerous Miracle (Bodley Head). Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Profile, £11.99) Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John S Tregoning (Oneworld, £10.99) Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History by Dorothy H Crawford (Oxford, £12.49)
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels
In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: 'We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.' More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance 'one of the most urgent global health threats'. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago. The thing to remember is that antibiotics are quite unlike other medicines. Most drugs work by manipulating human biology: paracetamol relieves your headache by dampening the chemical signals of pain; caffeine blocks adenosine receptors and as a result prevents drowsiness taking hold. Antibiotics, meanwhile, target bacteria. And, because bacteria spread between people, the challenge of resistance is social: it's as if every time you took a painkiller for your headache, you increased the chance that somebody else might have to undergo an operation without anaesthetic. That makes resistance more than simply a technological problem. But like that British doctor in 1954, we still often talk as if it is: we need to invent new 'weapons' to better defend ourselves. What this framing overlooks is that the extraordinary power of antibiotics is not due to human ingenuity. In fact, the majority of them derive from substances originally made by bacteria and fungi, evolved millions of years ago in a process of microbial competition. This is where I can't help thinking about another natural resource that helped create the modern world but has also been dangerously overused: fossil fuels. Just as Earth's geological forces turned dead plants from the Carboniferous era into layers of coal and oil that we could burn for energy, so evolution created molecules that scientists in the 20th century were able to recruit to keep us alive. Both have offered an illusory promise of cheap, miraculous and never-ending power over nature – a promise that is now coming to an end. If we thought of antibiotics as the 'fossil fuels' of modern medicine, might that change how we use them? And could it help us think of ways to make the fight against life-threatening infections more sustainable? The antibiotic era is less than a century old. Alexander Fleming first noticed the activity of a strange mould against bacteria in 1928, but it wasn't until the late 1930s that the active ingredient – penicillin – was isolated. A daily dose was just 60mg, about the same as a pinch of salt. For several years it was so scarce it was worth more than gold. But after production was scaled up during the second world war, it ended up costing less than the bottle it came in. This abundance did more than tackle infectious diseases. Just as the energy from fossil fuels transformed society, antibiotics allowed the entire edifice of modern medicine to be built. Consider surgery: cutting people open and breaking the protective barrier of the skin gives bacteria the chance to swarm into the body's internal tissues. Before antibiotics, even the simplest procedures frequently resulted in fatal blood poisoning. After them, so much more became possible: heart surgery, intestinal surgery, transplantation. Then there's cancer: chemotherapy suppresses the immune system, making bacterial infections one of the most widespread complications of treatment. The effects of antibiotics have rippled out even further: they made factory farming possible, both by reducing disease among animals kept in close quarters, and by increasing their weight through complex effects on metabolism. They're one of the reasons for the huge increase in meat consumption since the 1950s, with all its concomitant welfare and environmental effects. Despite the crisis of resistance, antibiotics remain cheap compared with other medicines. Partly – as with fossil fuels – this is because the negative consequences of their use (so-called externalities) are not priced in. And like coal, oil and gas, antibiotics lead to pollution. One recent study estimated that 31% of the 40 most used antibiotics worldwide enter rivers. Once they're out there, they increase levels of resistance in environmental bacteria: one study of soil from the Netherlands showed that the incidence of some antibiotic-resistant genes had increased by more than 15 times since the 1970s. Another source of pollution is manufacturing, particularly in countries such as India. In Hyderabad, where factories produce huge amounts of antibiotics for the global market, scientists have found that the wastewater contains levels of some antibiotics that are a million times higher than elsewhere. Like the climate crisis, antibiotic resistance has laid global inequalities bare. Some high-income countries have taken steps to decrease antibiotic use, but only after benefiting from their abundance in the past. That makes it hard for them to take a moral stand against their use in other places, a dilemma that mirrors the situation faced by post-industrial nations urging developing nations to forgo the economic benefits of cheap energy. This may be where the similarities end. While we look forward to the day when fossil fuels are phased out completely, that's clearly not the case with antibiotics, which are always going to be part of medicine's 'energy mix'. After all, most deaths from bacterial disease worldwide are due to lack of access to antibiotics, not resistance. What we are going to need to do is make our approach to development and use much more sustainable. Currently, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the search for new antibiotics: it's hard to imagine a more perfect anti-capitalist commodity than a product whose value depletes every time you use it. That means we need alternative models. One proposal is for governments to fund an international institute that develops publicly owned antibiotics, rather than relying on the private sector; another is to incentivise development with generously funded prizes for antibiotic discovery. And to address the issue of overuse, economists have suggested that health authorities could run 'subscription' models that remove the incentive to sell lots of antibiotics. In one pilot scheme in England, two companies are being paid a set amount per year by the NHS, regardless of how much of their product is actually used. Finally, we have to remember that antibiotics aren't the only game in town. Supporting other, 'renewable' approaches means we get to use the ones we do have for longer. Vaccines are vital to disease prevention – with every meningitis, diphtheria or whooping cough vaccine meaning a potential course of antibiotics forgone. And the 20th century's largest reductions in infectious disease occurred not because of antibiotics, but thanks to better sanitation and public health. (Even in the 2000s, the threat of MRSA was addressed with tried-and-tested methods such as handwashing and cleaning protocols – not new antibiotics.) Given that antibiotics themselves emerged unexpectedly, we should also be investing more in blue-skies research. Just as we no longer burn coal without a thought for the consequences, the era of carefree antibiotic use is now firmly in the past. In both cases, the idea that there wouldn't be a reckoning was always an illusion. But as with our slow waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, coming to appreciate the limits of our love affair with antibiotics may ultimately be no bad thing. Liam Shaw is a biologist at the University of Oxford, and author of Dangerous Miracle (Bodley Head). Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Profile, £11.99) Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John S Tregoning (Oneworld, £10.99) Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History by Dorothy H Crawford (Oxford, £12.49)
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israeli military preparing to expel Gaza City residents as baby in tent among those killed in latest attacks
The Israeli military will begin preparing for the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza City, it said on Saturday, as health officials said it had killed at least 40 people including a baby in a tent and people seeking aid in its latest attacks. The announcement came days after Israel said it intended to launch a new offensive to seize control of Gaza City, the enclave's largest urban centre, in a plan that raised international alarm. The Israeli offensive has already displaced most of the population, killed tens of thousands of civilians and created a famine. Gaza residents would be provided with tents and other shelter equipment starting from Sunday ahead of relocating them from combat zones to the south of the enclave 'to ensure their safety,' the Israeli military claimed on Saturday. It did not say when the mass displacement would begin. Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it had declared as safe zones. On Saturday a baby girl and her parents were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit a tent in al-Muwasi, previously designated a humanitarian zone by Israel, in southern Gaza, Nasser hospital officials and witnesses said. 'Two and a half months, what has she done?' her neighbour Fathi Shubeir asked. 'They are civilians in an area designated safe.' Israel's military said it couldn't comment on the strike without more details. Al-Muwasi is now one of the most heavily populated areas in Gaza after Israel pushed people into the desolate area. But prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week said Israel planned to widen its coming military offensive to include the area, along with Gaza City and 'central camps' – an apparent reference to the built-up Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza. According to the civil defence agency, at least 13 of the Palestinians killed on Saturday were shot by troops as they were waiting to collect food aid near distribution sites in the north and in the south. There were also another 11 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Saturday, including at least one child. That brings malnutrition-related deaths due to the Israeli blockade on aid to 251. In recent days, Gaza City residents have reported more frequent air strikes targeting residential areas especially in the east and south and including the Zeitun neighbourhood. Hamas said on Saturday the military was targeting the area with warplanes, artillery and drones. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said conditions in Zeitun were rapidly deteriorating with residents having little to no access to food and water amid heavy Israeli bombardment. He said that about 50,000 people were estimated to be in that area of Gaza City, 'the majority of whom are without food or water' and lacking 'the basic necessities of life'. Ghassan Kashko, 40, who is sheltering with his family at a school building in the neighbourhood, said: 'We don't know the taste of sleep.' He said air strikes and tank shelling were causing 'explosions... that don't stop'. Israel was carrying out ethnic cleansing in Zeitun, Bassal said. The Israeli military says it abides by international law though rights groups, including in Israel, say it is committing genocide. In its announcement on Saturday the military said shelter equipment would be transferred via the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza by the United Nations and other international relief organisations after being inspected by defence ministry personnel, the military said. Israeli inspections and bureaucracy have until now resulted in much aid being refused entry to the territory. A spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs expressed concern over Israel's plans to relocate people to southern Gaza saying it would only increase suffering. But the UN body welcomed Israel's recognition that shelter is a desperate need and that tents and other shelter equipment will be allowed again into Gaza. 'The UN and its partners will seize the opportunity this opens,' the spokesperson said. The UN warned on Thursday that thousands of families already enduring appalling humanitarian conditions could be pushed over the edge if the Gaza City plan moves ahead. Palestinian and United Nations officials have said no place in the enclave is safe, including areas in southern Gaza where Israel has been ordering residents to move to. The military declined to comment when asked whether the shelter equipment was intended for Gaza City's population, estimated at around one million people presently, and whether the site to which they will be relocated in southern Gaza would be the area of Rafah, which borders Egypt. Israel's defence minister Israel Katz said on Saturday that the plans for the new offensive were still being formulated. The Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, said that the military's announcement 'as part of its brutal attack to occupy Gaza City, is a blatant and brazen mockery of international conventions.' Protests calling for a hostage release and an end to the war were expected throughout Israel on Sunday, with many businesses, municipalities and universities saying they will support employees striking for the day. The families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas called for the 'nationwide day of stoppage' on Sunday to express growing frustration over the war. They fear the coming offensive will further endanger the 50 hostages remaining in Gaza, just 20 of whom are thought to still be alive.
