A top United Nations official warned Friday of deteriorating humanitarian conditions across Gaza and reiterated calls for Israel to immediately halt its bombardment to allow aid to get in.
A week after the United Nations Security Council passed a weakened resolution seeking to hasten aid to Gaza, Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari said “the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate.”
Last week’s heavily negotiated and long-delayed resolution called for immediately speeding aid deliveries to civilians in Gaza, but an appeal for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas was taken out.
Khiari said the U.N. will report next week on the implementation of an earlier Security Council resolution, from Nov. 15, that called for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.
Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have streamed into the already overwhelmed town of Rafah in the southernmost end of Gaza in recent days, according to the United Nations. The Israeli-Hamas war has already driven around 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people from their homes, leveling the northern part of the territory and heightening fears about a similar fate for the south.
More than 20,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants among the dead.
About 1,200 people were killed after Hamas raided southern Israel on Oct. 7, with around 240 people taken hostage.
Currently:
— Palestinians stream into a southern Gaza town as Israel expands its offensive in the center
— The Biden administration once more bypasses US Congress on an emergency weapons sale to Israel
— An American-Canadian-Israeli woman believed to have been held hostage since Oct. 7 is declared dead
— As Gaza war grinds on, tensions soar along Israel’s volatile northern border with Lebanon
— Find more of news agencies’s coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.
Here’s what’s happening in the war:
CAIRO — UNICEF said that it delivered at least 600,000 doses of vaccines to Gaza on Friday to protect children in the besieged enclave from diseases.
The move comes as illnesses spiral across the territory, which lacks clean water and basic medical supplies.
Few details about the delivery process were made public by UNICEF, which announced the news on the platform X.
The group said that more than 16,800 infants have missed one or more routine vaccines, and that it will work with the WHO and UNRWA to deliver the arriving vaccines.
Israeli officials confirmed the arrival of tens of thousands of vaccines for such diseases as polio, tuberculosis, measles and hepatitis, in coordination with UNICEF.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — South Africa launched a case Friday at the United Nations’ top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and asking the court to order Israel to halt its attacks.
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