Latest news with #Khan Younis
Japan Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Japan Times
Israel sends tanks into Gaza's Deir al-Balah, leaving hostage families concerned
Israeli tanks pushed into the southern and eastern districts of the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah for the first time on Monday, an area where Israeli sources said the military believes hostages may be held. The area is packed with Palestinians displaced during more than 21 months of war in the Gaza Strip, hundreds of whom fled west or south after Israel issued an evacuation order, saying it sought to destroy infrastructure and capabilities of the militant group Hamas. Tank shelling in the area hit houses and mosques, killing at least three Palestinians and wounding several others, local medics said. "U.N. staff remain in Deir al-Balah, and two U.N. guesthouses have been struck, despite parties having been informed of the locations of U.N. premises, which are inviolable. These locations — as with all civilian sites — must be protected, regardless of evacuation orders," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. The World Health Organization said its staff residence and main warehouse in Deir al-Balah was attacked on Monday. Two WHO staff and two family members were detained by the Israeli military, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that three were later released while one staff member remained in detention. Israel's mission to the U.N. in New York declined to comment. To the south in Khan Younis, an Israeli airstrike killed at least five people, including a husband and wife and their two children in a tent, medics said. In its daily update, Gaza's Health Ministry said at least 130 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1,000 wounded by Israeli gunfire and military strikes across the territory in the past 24 hours, one of the highest such totals in recent weeks. There was no immediate Israeli comment on the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis incidents. Palestinians ride away from an Israeli attack along Salah al-din road in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Monday. | AFP-JIJI Israeli sources have said the reason the army had stayed out of the Deir al-Balah districts was because they suspected Hamas might be holding hostages there. At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in captivity in Gaza are believed to be still alive. Families of the hostages have expressed concern for their relatives and demanded an explanation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz and the army chief on how they will protect them. "The people of Israel will not forgive anyone who knowingly endangered the hostages — both the living and the deceased. No one will be able to claim they didn't know what was at stake," the Hostage Families Forum Headquarters said in a statement. Gaza health officials have warned of potential "mass deaths" in coming days from hunger, which has killed at least 19 people since Saturday, the Hamas-run territory's Health Ministry said. Hunger United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was appalled by an accelerating breakdown of humanitarian conditions in Gaza "where the last lifelines keeping people alive are collapsing," Dujarric said. "He deplores the growing reports of children and adults suffering from malnutrition," said Dujarric. "Israel has the obligation to allow and facilitate by all the means at its disposal the humanitarian relief provided by the United Nations and by other humanitarian organizations." Health officials say hospitals have been running out of fuel, food aid and medicine, risking a halt to vital operations. Health Ministry spokesperson Khalil Al-Deqran said medical staff have been depending on one meal a day and that hundreds of people flock to hospitals every day, suffering from fatigue and exhaustion. In southern Gaza, the Health Ministry said an Israeli undercover unit had on Monday detained Marwan Al-Hams, head of Gaza's field hospitals, in a raid that killed a local journalist and wounded another outside a field medical facility run by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Smoke billows into the air during Israeli strikes in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Monday. | REUTERS An ICRC spokesperson said the ICRC had treated patients injured in the incident, but did not comment further on their status. It said it was "very concerned about the safety and security" around the field hospital. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel has raided and attacked hospitals across Gaza during the war, accusing Hamas of using them for military purposes, an accusation the group denies. Sending undercover forces to carry out arrests is rare. The incursion into Deir al-Balah and the growing number of deaths appeared to be complicating efforts to secure a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with U.S. backing. A Hamas official said on Sunday that the militant group was angered by the mounting death toll and hunger crisis, and said it could affect the talks on a 60-day truce and hostage deal. Aid waiting UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency dedicated to Palestinians, said on X it was receiving desperate messages from Gaza warning of starvation, including from its own staff, as food prices have soared. "Meanwhile, just outside Gaza, stockpiled in warehouses, UNRWA has enough food for the entire population for over three months. Lift the siege and let aid in safely and at scale," it said. The Health Ministry said on Sunday at least 67 people were killed by Israeli fire as they waited for U.N. aid trucks to enter Gaza. It said at least 36 aid seekers were killed a day earlier. Israel's military said its troops had fired warning shots to remove what it said was "an immediate threat." It said initial findings suggested that reported casualty figures were inflated. Israel's military said it "views the transfer of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as a matter of utmost importance, and works to enable and facilitate its entry in coordination with the international community." Britain and more than 20 other countries called on Monday for an immediate end to the war in Gaza and criticized the Israeli government's aid delivery model after hundreds of Palestinians were killed near sites distributing food. Israel rejected the statement "as it is disconnected from reality and sends the wrong message to Hamas." The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. The Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has since killed over 59,000 Palestinians, according to health officials, displaced almost the entire population, and caused a humanitarian crisis.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Israeli tanks move deep into Gaza where hostages are believed to be held
Israeli tanks pushed into the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah for the first time on Monday. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) believe some of the remaining hostages may be being held in the city, which is crowded with thousands of displaced Palestinians. Gaza medics said at least three Palestinians were killed and several were wounded after tank shelling hit eight houses and three mosques in the area. The Israeli assault comes a day after the IDF ordered residents to leave, saying it planned to fight Hamas militants. The raid and bombardment forced dozens of families to flee and head west towards the coastal part of Deir al-Balah and nearby Khan Younis. Earlier on Monday, an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis killed at least five people, including a man, his wife, and their two children, medics said. There was no immediate Israeli comment on the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis incidents.
ABC News
2 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Israel sends tanks into central Gaza's Deir Al-Balah for the first time
Israeli tanks have pushed into southern and eastern areas of the Gazan city of Deir Al-Balah for the first time, an area where Israeli sources said the military believes some of the remaining hostages may be held. Gaza medics said at least three Palestinians were killed and several were wounded in tank shelling that hit eight houses and three mosques in the area, and which came a day after the military ordered residents to leave, saying it planned to fight Hamas militants. The raid and bombardment pushed dozens of families who had remained to flee and head west towards the coastal area of Deir Al-Balah and nearby Khan Younis. Thousands of displaced people are living in Deir Al-Balah, including Medical Aid for Palestinian (MAP) staff. MAP's Interim CEO Steve Cutts said the latest forced displacement order is "yet another attack on humanitarian operations" and a "deliberate attempt to sever the last remaining threads of Gaza's health and aid system". He said that MAP had to suspend critical services provided to the Palestinian population, including a primary health clinic serving hundreds of civilians every day. "With Israel's systematic targeting of health and aid workers, no-one is safe," he said. "Not only are we prevented from carrying out our lifesaving work to support Palestinians, we are also unable to protect our own teams." In Khan Younis earlier on Monday, an Israeli air strike killed at least five people, including a man, his wife, and their two children in a tent, medics said. There was no immediate Israeli comment on the Deir Al-Balah and Khan Younis incidents. Israel's military said it had not entered the districts of Deir Al-Balah subject to the evacuation order during the current conflict and that it was continuing "to operate with great force to destroy the enemy's capabilities and terrorist infrastructure in the area". Israeli sources have said the reason the army has so far stayed out is that they suspect Hamas might be holding hostages there. At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in captivity in Gaza are believed to be still alive. Families of the hostages expressed their concern for their relatives and demanded an explanation from the army of how it would protect them. The military escalation comes as Gaza health officials warned of potential "mass deaths" in the coming days due to mounting hunger, which has killed at least 19 people since Saturday, according to the territory's health ministry. Health officials said hospitals were running out of fuel, food aid, and medicine, risking a halt to vital operations. Health ministry spokesperson Khalil Al-Deqran said medical staff have been depending on one meal a day, and that hundreds of people flock to hospitals every day, suffering from fatigue and exhaustion because of hunger. At least 67 people were killed by Israeli fire on Sunday as they waited for UN aid trucks to enter Gaza. Israel's military said its troops had fired warning shots towards a crowd of thousands of people in northern Gaza to remove what it said was "an immediate threat". It said initial findings suggested reported casualty figures were inflated, and it "certainly does not intentionally target humanitarian aid trucks". The new raid and escalating number of fatalities appeared to be complicating ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel that are being mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with US backing. A Hamas official told Reuters on Sunday that the militant group was angered over the mounting deaths and the hunger crisis in the enclave, and that this could badly affect ceasefire talks underway in Qatar. Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks in Doha aimed at reaching a 60-day truce and hostage deal, although there has been no sign of breakthrough. UNRWA, the UN refugee agency dedicated to Palestinians, said it was receiving desperate messages from Gaza warning of starvation, including from its own staff as food prices have increased 40-fold. "Meanwhile, just outside Gaza, stockpiled in warehouses UNRWA has enough food for the entire population for over three months. Lift the siege and let aid in safely and at scale," it said in a post on social media site X. Israel's military said on Sunday that it "views the transfer of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as a matter of utmost importance, and works to enable and facilitate its entry in coordination with the international community". The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies. The Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has since killed more than 58,000 Palestinians, according to health officials, displaced almost the entire population and plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis. Reuters/ABC
Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- Al Jazeera
Israeli forces kill 92 aid seekers in Gaza as 19 people starve to death
Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians across Gaza, including 92 people who were shot dead while trying to get food at the Zikim crossing in the north and aid points in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south. The killings on Sunday came as Israel's continued siege of Gaza worsened a hunger crisis, with health authorities there announcing at least 19 deaths from starvation over the past day. In Zikim, Israeli forces shot at least 79 Palestinians, according to medical sources, as large crowds gathered there in the hopes of getting flour from a United Nations aid convoy. Nine more were killed near an aid point in Rafah, where 36 others had lost their lives just 24 hours earlier. Four more were killed near a second aid site in Khan Younis, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence. Rizeq Betaar, a Palestinian man who survived the attack at Zikim, helped carry one young victim to the hospital. 'We saw this young man lying on the ground, and we were the ones who carried him on the bicycle. We're trying to get him to help. But there is nothing,' Betaar said. 'There are no ambulances, no food, no life, no way to live any more. We're barely hanging on.' Another survivor, Osama Marouf, also helped to transport an old man who was shot and wounded. 'We brought this old man from Zikim. He went just to get some flour,' Marouf said. 'I tried to save him on the bicycle – I don't even want the flour any more, he's like my father, this old man. May God give me the strength to do good. And may this hardship not last much longer.' Israel's military acknowledged the attack, saying it had fired 'warning shots to remove an immediate threat posed to the troops' in northern Gaza. It did not, however, provide evidence or details of the alleged threat. The military went on to dispute the high number of casualties. 'New levels of desperation' The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) issued a statement that disputed the Israeli account, saying the victims were simply people 'trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation'. It said the Israeli shootings happened shortly after a convoy of 25 trucks carrying food assistance crossed the Zikim point. 'Shortly after passing the final checkpoint… the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,' the agency said. 'As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.' The violence came despite assurances from Israel that operational conditions for humanitarian agencies in Gaza would improve, the WFP said, including that armed forces would not be present nor engage along convoy routes. 'Gaza's hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation. People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days,' the WFP warned. 'Only a massive scale-up in food aid distributions can stabilise this spiraling situation, calm anxieties and rebuild the trust within communities that more food is coming,' it added. Gaza's Ministry of Health echoed that warning, saying that at least 19 Palestinians died of hunger on Sunday and hundreds more suffering from malnutrition could die soon. 'We warn that hundreds of people whose bodies have wasted away are at risk of imminent death due to hunger,' a spokesperson for the ministry said. The ministry added that at least 71 children have died of malnutrition since the war began in 2023, while 60,000 others show signs of severe undernourishment. Al Jazeera's Hind Khoudary, reporting from central Gaza, said that a 35-day-old baby in Gaza City and a four-month-old child in Deir el-Balah had died of malnutrition at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. 'The mother was touching her body, saying, 'I am sorry I could not feed you,'' Khoudary said. 'Parents go to the GHF [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] distribution sites to risk getting killed or leave their children starving. We met a mother who is giving her children water just to fill their stomachs. She can't afford flour – and when she could, she couldn't find it.' 'Heading into the unknown' In southern Gaza, Israeli forces killed at least 13 people waiting for food near a distribution point run by the United States-backed GHF. The killings brought the number of Palestinians killed at or near GHF sites since May to nearly 1,000 people. Ahmed Hassouna, who was trying to bring food back from the GHF aid site, said an Israeli tank 'came at us from the side'. 'There was a young man with me, too – and they started firing gas at us. They killed us with the gas. We barely made it out to catch a breath, they suffocated us with the gas,' Hassouna told Al Jazeera. The UN and humanitarian aid agencies have long denounced the GHF for its 'weaponisation' of aid in Gaza and called on Israel to allow the entry of other humanitarian assistance, which has been blocked from entering the enclave. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said staff in Gaza are sending desperate messages about the lack of food. 'All man-made, in total impunity. Food is available only a few kilometres away,' he wrote on X, adding that UNRWA has enough supplies at the border to feed Gaza for three months. But Israel has been blocking aid since March 2. The US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also denounced Israel's continuous attacks on aid seekers. 'The escalating massacres of starving Palestinian women, children and men murdered with US-supplied weapons and with the complicity of our government as they desperately search for food to feed their families is not only a human tragedy, it is also an indictment of a Western political order that has enabled this genocide through inaction and indifference,' said Nihad Awad, CAIR's national executive director. 'Western governments cannot claim ignorance. They are watching in real time as innocent civilians are intentionally starved, forcibly displaced, and slaughtered – and are choosing to do nothing. History will long remember the Western world's indifference to the forced starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.' Doctors in Gaza, meanwhile, said there has been a surge in people showing up at hospitals weak and malnourished, but that they do not have the resources needed to treat them. Dr Mohammed Abu Afash, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that women and children are collapsing from hunger. 'We are heading into the unknown. Malnutrition among children has reached its highest levels,' he said, warning of a looming disaster if aid is not allowed in immediately.
ABC News
3 days ago
- ABC News
Israeli fire kills dozens seeking aid in Gaza, hospital says
At least 36 people have been killed by Israeli fire while they were on their way to an aid distribution site in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The Israeli military said it had fired warning shots at suspects who approached its troops after they did not heed calls to stop, about a kilometre away from an aid distribution site that was not active at the time. Gaza resident Mohammed al-Khalidi said he was in the group approaching the site and heard no warnings before the firing began at dawn on Saturday. "We thought they came out to organise us so we can get aid, suddenly [I] saw the Jeeps coming from one side, and the tanks from the other and started shooting at us," he said. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed group that runs the aid site, said there were no incidents or fatalities there on Saturday and that it has repeatedly warned people not to travel to its distribution points in the dark. "The reported IDF [Israel Defense Forces] activity resulting in fatalities occurred hours before our sites opened and our understanding is most of the casualties occurred several kilometres away from the nearest GHF site," it said. The Israeli military said it was reviewing the incident. GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians. Hamas denies the accusation. The UN has called the GHF's model unsafe and a breach of humanitarian impartiality standards, which GHF denies. On Tuesday, the UN rights office in Geneva said it had recorded at least 875 killings in the past six weeks in the vicinity of aid sites and food convoys in Gaza — the majority of them close to GHF distribution points. Most of those deaths were caused by gunfire that locals have blamed on the Israeli military. The military has acknowledged that civilians were harmed, saying that Israeli forces had been issued new instructions with "lessons learned". At least 50 more people were killed in other Israeli attacks across Gaza on Saturday, health officials said, including one strike that killed the head of the Hamas-run police force in Nuseirat in central Gaza and 11 of his family members. The Israeli military said it had struck militants' weapon depots and sniping posts in a few locations in the enclave. The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza. The Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has since killed about 58,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians according to health officials, displaced almost the entire population and plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis, leaving much of the territory in ruins. Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks in Doha aimed at reaching a US-proposed 60-day ceasefire and a hostage deal mediated by Egypt and Qatar, though there has been no sign of any imminent breakthrough. At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in Gaza are believed to still be alive. Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan was kidnapped from his kibbutz home and is held by Hamas, urged Israel's leaders to make a deal with the militant group. "An entire people wants to bring all 50 hostages home and end the war," Ms Zangauker said in a statement outside Israel's defence headquarters in Tel Aviv. "My Matan is alone in the tunnels," she said. "He has no more time." Reuters
