Gaza: Deadly toll remains unchanged as core human rights demands end suffering

“Six months after the start of the war, 10,000 Palestinian women, including an estimated 6,000 mothers, have been murdered in Gaza, leaving 19,000 children orphaned,” UN Women said in a new report.

“More than a million women and girls in Gaza have almost no food, no access to safe water, latrines, washrooms or sanitary pads, while diseases are on the rise in inhumane living conditions.”

Following these concerns, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a new call for a ceasefire so that humanitarian aid can be brought to Gaza to help rebuild hospitals, including Al Shifa, which “actually destroyedafter a recent Israeli raid.
“The management is trying to get the emergency department clean (but) the work is enormous just to get a clean, let alone get supplies,” said WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic, after a new UN mission health organization to the destroyed medical centers. Monday in Gaza City.

There is little left to save

Only a third of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain functional, meaning it is essential to “preserve what is left” of the enclave’s healthcare system, Mr. Jasarevic stressed.

But the needs remain enormous more than 76,000 people were injuredAccording to local authorities, several UN agencies have repeatedly warned that amputations and caesarean section births have been carried out without anesthesia.

“Again we really advocate that the deconfliction mechanism is effectiveto be transparent and workable,” the WHO official said, referring to the approval system used by humanitarians in coordination with the warring parties to ensure aid convoys are not targeted.

Concerns remain over the deconfliction protocol after seven aid workers from the NGO World Central Kitchen were killed in Israeli airstrikes on April 1.

But “more than half” of the planned WHO missions between last October and the end of March “have either been denied or postponed or are facing other obstacles, so they have to be postponed, so we really need that access,” Mr. stressed Jasarevic, amid repeated dire warnings from humanitarian workers about the impending famine in Gaza.

No help for the injured

A lack of staff, needles, stitches and other essential medical equipment has left “injured children often languishing in pain” in hospitals or makeshift shelters, said Tess Ingram, communications specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Speaking from Cairo after her latest mission to northern Gaza, where her UN vehicle was attacked, Ms. Ingram told journalists it was remarkable how many young people were injured during intense Israeli bombings, launched in response to Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Gaza. Gaza. Israel on October 7.

“Imagine being briefly searched naked and interrogated for hours, being told you are safe and then leaving; you walk quickly down the street and pray that you will be okay. But then you get shot, your father is killed and a bullet enters your naked pelvis, causing serious internal and external injuries that require reconstructive surgery. In a field hospital Younis told me this happened to him. He’s 14.”

The UNICEF official also emphasized how difficult it remains to evacuate desperately injured or sick patients for medical care outside Gaza. Less than half of all “medivac” applications have been approved This means that only about 4,500 people – “most of them children” – have been able to leave Gaza, at a rate of less than 20 per day.

Call from the rights chief

Underscoring the plight of those in Gaza, UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday urged “all states with influence” to halt the “increasingly horrific human rights and humanitarian crisis” unfolding there.

“Israel continues to impose unlawful restrictions on access to and distribution of humanitarian aid and to carry out widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights insisted, before renewing calls for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all remaining hostages.

West Bank in spiral shape

The High Commissioner for Human Rights also expressed deep concern over the increasing violence and “waves of attacks” against Palestinians in the West Bank in recent days.by hundreds of Israeli settlersoften accompanied or supported by the Israeli Security Forces (ISF)”.

After the killing of a 14-year-old Israeli boy from a settler family, four Palestinians, including a child, were killed and Palestinian property was destroyed in revenge attacks, Mr. Türk said in a statement.

Citing information received by his office, OHCHR, the UN rights chief reported that armed settlers and Israeli forces entered “a number of towns,” including Al Mughayyer, the village of Beitin in Ramallah, Duma and Qusra in Nablus, as well as the governorates of Bethlehem and Hebron. .

Dozens of Palestinians were reportedly injured in the ensuing violence hundreds of houses and other buildings, as well as cars, were set on firethe High Commissioner said, before insisting that “neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis should take the law into their own hands to take revenge.”

Regional ‘trigger’

In a related development in Geneva, the head of a UN-appointed independent rights inquiry into the occupied Palestinian territories spoke of her “grave alarm” over the possibility of military escalation between Israel and Iran and the risks of provoking a regional conflict. .

In a briefing to Arab League states days after Iran launched a massive drone and missile attack on Israel, Navi Pillay highlighted the “unprecedented” scale of the war Israel is undergoing.
More than 33,200 people have been killed so far, according to the Gaza Health Authority, Ms. Pillay said, with around 40 percent of schools directly affected by attacks and 1.7 million people displaced within the enclave.

“The complete siege of Gaza since October 2023 has resulted in an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe, with famine and starvation now a reality for its inhabitants,” said the head of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. The destruction of roads and infrastructure has seriously compromised the ability of humanitarian actors to deliver assistance to the population.”