ISRAELI forces have killed at least 32 Palestinians in Gaza since dawn, including 11 people who burned to death inside their home in Khan Younis, and carried out air strikes that destroyed equipment used to retrieve the dead from under rubble.
Seven members of a family were also killed on Tuesday by an air raid on the home where they were sheltering in western Gaza City. Three civilians, including two girls, were killed when Israeli warplanes targeted a group of people in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, warned that more than two million people – mostly women and children – were being collectively punished.
“Gaza has become a land of desperation,” he said on X.
Nearly 3,000 trucks of UNRWA supplies and humanitarian aid remained stuck outside Gaza, unable to enter while food and medicine inside the strip are quickly running out.
“Hunger is spreading,” Lazzarini warned. “Humanitarian aid is being used as a bargaining chip – a weapon of war.”
The UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, warned that withholding humanitarian aid constitutes a war crime. “This action would further aggravate conditions of life calculated to destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza.”
Hamas slammed Israel’s ongoing blockade, which began on March 2. “The Gaza Strip is facing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” the group said in a statement, citing severe shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
It added that the siege as well as daily attacks on shelters, hospitals and residential areas amount to a “premeditated crime” by the Israeli leadership.
Hamas also blamed the situation on a “political, moral, and humanitarian failure” on the part of the international community and called on the UN and other institutions to pressure Israel to lift the blockade on aid.
