A top World Health Organization official in Gaza says he’s seeing no letup in the intensity of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The U.N. health agency, citing the latest figures from the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, also says the conflict that erupted Oct. 7 has now killed more than 23,000 people in the enclave.
Sean Casey, WHO’s emergency medical teams coordinator based in southern Rafah, decried dire food shortages in the north. He said some health workers are now fleeing out of fear for their own lives — after sticking it out for months to treat patients.
“I’ve been in Gaza for five weeks. I have not seen a lowering of the intensity of the conflict,” Casey told a U.N. briefing in Geneva by video from the southern Gaza city of Rafah. “I went to Nasser Medical Complex just a few days ago and saw multiple explosions just in the few minutes that I was driving down the roads.”
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Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, said from Jerusalem that in addition to the more than 23,000 people killed, nearly 59,000 people had been injured.
He cited multiple trauma cases: “spinal trauma, crush injuries, severe burns, amputees — I’ve never seen so many amputees in my life, including among children.”
“This will have such a long-term impact for everything,” he said.
The United States has pressed Israel to scale down its offensive in Gaza to more precise operations targeting Hamas. But the pace of death and destruction has remained largely the same, with several hundred Palestinians killed a day, according to health officials in Gaza. Israel has vowed to keep going until it has destroyed Hamas throughout the territory.
Still, after three months of fighting, Hamas continues to put up a fierce fight.
The Israeli military says it has dismantled Hamas infrastructure in northern Gaza, where large swaths of the cityscape have been demolished. But fighting continues there against what Israel says are pockets of militants. The offensive’s focus has shifted to the southern city of Khan Younis, where ground troops have been fighting militants for weeks, and a number of urban refugee camps in central Gaza.
“The fighting will continue throughout 2024,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said.
Throughout the night and into Tuesday morning, warplanes struck multiple areas in and around Khan Younis. Israeli artillery shelling and gunfire echoed through the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where troops have been pushing in from the north, said one resident, Saeed Moustafa. They were facing heavy resistance from gunmen in the camp, he said.
Like other refugee camps in Gaza, Nuseirat was built to house Palestinians driven out of homes during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, and over the decades it has been built up into a densely populated town housing refugees and their descendants.
Families in Nuseirat’s northern neighborhoods were fleeing to other parts of the camp, Moustafa said by phone, with the sound of sporadic gunfire in the background. Some tried to head south on the Gaza’s main north-south road but found it blocked by Israeli tanks and turned around, he said. In leaflets, the military had told people evacuating to use another road, along the coast.
The U.N. humanitarian office, known as OCHA, warned that the fighting was severely hampering aid deliveries. Several warehouses, distribution centers, health facilities and shelters have been affected by the military's evacuation orders, it said. Some bakeries in the central city of Deir al-Balah have been forced to shut down. A U.N. warehouse was hit last week, killing a staffer, and five other staffers were detained by the military, with two still held.
The situation is even more dire in northern Gaza, which Israeli forces cut off from the rest of the territory in late October. Tens of thousands of people who remain there face shortages of food and water.
The World Health Organization has been unable to deliver supplies to the north for two weeks. OCHA said the military rejected five attempted aid convoys to the north over that period, including planned deliveries of medical supplies and fuel for water and sanitation facilities.
As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel, exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah continued their spiral since last week's killing of Hamas deputy leader Saleh Arouri in Beirut.
Hezbollah said its drone strike on the base in northern Israel on Tuesday was further retaliation for the killing of Arouri and of a senior Hezbollah commander in an Israeli bombing Monday.
Tuesday morning, an Israeli drone hit a car in southern Lebanon, killing three people inside, security officials in the area and the state news agency said. There was no immediate word on the identities of the three.
Israel has repeatedly warned that time is running out before it launches a campaign to end militants’ fire across the border.