Mass Grave at Gaza Main Hospital, Calls For Evacuation, Palestinian Babies At Risk
Mass grave at Gaza main hospital, call for evacuation, fuel shortage hampers aid flow
Palestinians call for evacuation from Gaza hospital
Palestinian authorities proposed a Red Cross-supervised evacuation of patients and newborns from Gaza’s largest hospital beset by fighting on Tuesday.
It came as health officials warned the only way to save three dozen newborns trapped at al-Chifa Hospital would be to call a ceasefire and transport them out of the besieged territory.
After days of battles with Palestinian militants, Israeli forces have encircled the hospital, where hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced people are trapped with dwindling supplies and without electricity to run incubators and other equipment.
On Tuesday, the director of the hospital Doctor Mohammed Abou Salmiya told AFP they had to bury dozens of dead in a mass grave.
A journalist working with the French news agency inside the facility said the smell of decomposing bodies was overpowering.
Gaza’s largest hospital has emerged as a symbol of Palestinian suffering in the war between Israel and Hamas that extends far beyond its walls.
Only one hospital in the territory’s north is still capable of receiving patients, and about 200,000 Palestinians have streamed out of the area toward worsening conditions in the south in recent days, the UN humanitarian office said Tuesday.
Israel accuses Palestinian militants of using the sick and displaced at the hospital as “human shields”. It has, however, not provided concrete proof for its allegations.
Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner said overnight from Monday to Tuesday “the idea is to try to evacuate people, to evacuate as many as possible” from the site.
Gaza’s health ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, have died since the hospital’s emergency generator ran out of fuel on Saturday.
According to the ministry, 36 babies remain who are at risk of dying because there is no power for incubators.
Renowned Israeli peace activist confirmed killed in Hamas attack
Vivian Silver, a Canadian-born Israeli activist who devoted her life to seeking peace with the Palestinians, was confirmed killed in Hamas’ 7 October incursion into southern Israel.
For 38 days, Silver, who had moved to Israel in the 1970s and made her home in Kibbutz Be’eri, had been believed to be among the nearly 240 hostages held in the Gaza Strip.
But identification of some of the most badly burned remains has gone slowly, and her family was notified of her death on Monday.
Silver was a dominant figure in several groups that promoted peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as a prominent Israeli human rights group. She also volunteered with a group that drove Gaza cancer patients to Israeli hospitals for medical care.
“On the one hand, she was small and fragile. Very sensitive,” her son Yonatan Zeigen told Israel Radio on Tuesday. “On the other hand, she was a force of nature. She had a giant spirit. She was very assertive. She had very strong core beliefs about the world and life.”
Around 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’ deadly attack at the start of October, according to the authorities. The vast majority were civilians.
As of Friday, more than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed since the war began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
Israeli statement on nuclear option in Gaza condemned
China, many Arab nations and Iran condemned an Israeli minister’s statement that dropping a nuclear bomb could be an option in the country’s fight against Hamas.
At Monday’s opening of a UN conference on establishing a nuclear-free Middle East, speaker after speaker said the Israeli statement posed a threat to the region and the wider world.
Condemnations were in response to comments by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu on the possible use of nuclear weapons in Gaza in a radio interview.
His remarks were quickly disavowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who suspended Eliyahu from cabinet meetings.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its nuclear capability. It is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. A former employee at its nuclear reactor served 18 years in Israeli prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons programme to a British newspaper in 1986.
China’s deputy UN ambassador Geng Shuang said Beijing was “shocked” at what “Israeli officials said about the use of nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip,” calling the statements “extremely irresponsible and disturbing”.
He stressed the statements run “counter to the international consensus that a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought.”
He urged Israeli officials to retract the statement and become a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, considered the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament, “as soon as possible.”
Fuel shortage hampering aid delivery in Gaza – UN
The fuel crisis in Gaza is so dramatic that trucks filled with aid arriving through the Rafah crossing from Egypt won’t be unloaded starting Tuesday because there is no fuel for the forklifts, or for vehicles to deliver the food, water and medicine they’re carrying to those in desperate need, a senior UN humanitarian official has said.
Andrea De Domenico, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said “lives in Gaza are hanging by a thread due to the bleeding of fuel and medical supplies.”
Since Israeli troops arrived in Gaza City centre five days ago, it has been too dangerous for the UN to coordinate any operation in the north, he added.
De Domenico said in a video press conference with UN correspondents from east Jerusalem that the intensified fighting over the weekend around al-Chifa Hospital – the biggest in Gaza City – damaged critical infrastructure including water tanks, oxygen stations and the cardiovascular facility in the maternity ward.
Three nurses were reported killed, he continued.
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch said the “Israeli military’s repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and transport are further destroying Gaza’s healthcare system and should be investigated as war crimes.”
