- LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
- United Nations aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday due to fuel shortages and a communications breakdown
- Israeli troops recover the body of a soldier held hostage
- According to the WFP, civilians are at “imminent risk of starvation.”
GAZA/JERUSALEM, Nov 17 (Portal) – U.N. aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday due to fuel shortages and communications shutdowns, compounding the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops battled Hamas militants in the enclave.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) said civilians were facing “imminent danger of starvation” due to a lack of food.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that several Palestinians were killed and others injured in an Israeli attack that hit a group of displaced people near the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt – the transit point for aid supplies.
Al Jazeera TV quoted sources as saying nine people were killed in the strike. There was no immediate comment from Israel on the reported attack and Portal was unable to verify it.
In other developments, Israel said its troops found a tunnel shaft used by Hamas at Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza.
The hospital, overwhelmed with patients and displaced people and struggling to keep operations running, has been the focus of concern around the world this week. Israel says Hamas has stockpiled weapons and ammunition and is holding hostages in a network of tunnels beneath hospitals like Shifa, using patients and people seeking refuge there as human shields. Hamas denies this.
As the war nears its seventh week, there are no signs of easing despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least a humanitarian pause.
The conflict was sparked by a cross-border raid by Hamas militants on October 7 that killed about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, on the deadliest day in the state’s 75-year history.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 11,500 Palestinians, including at least 4,700 children, have now been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military attack on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip – a figure that far exceeds the toll in previous conflicts in recent years.
Israel has vowed to wipe out the militant group. Entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip have been leveled by air and artillery attacks, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes and the humanitarian situation is catastrophic, aid organizations say.
TRUCKS SUSPENDED
The United Nations said there would be no cross-border relief operation on Friday due to fuel shortages and a communications blackout. No aid trucks arrived in Gaza for the second day in a row on Thursday due to a lack of fuel to distribute aid.
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said almost the entire population was in urgent need of food assistance.
“Food and water supplies are virtually non-existent in Gaza and only a fraction of what is needed arrives across the borders,” she said in a statement.
“As winter approaches, shelters are unsafe and overcrowded, and clean water is lacking, civilians face imminent starvation,” McCain said.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff said Israel was close to destroying Hamas’s military system in the northern Gaza Strip and there were signs the army was expanding its campaign to other parts of the coastal enclave of 2.3 million people.
Israel accused Hamas of preventing people from traveling to southern Gaza, something the militant group denied.
The army released a video showing a tunnel entrance in an outdoor area of Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital.
The video, which Portal could not immediately verify, showed a deep hole in the ground littered and surrounded by concrete, wood debris and sand. It appeared the area had been excavated. A bulldozer appeared in the background.
The army said its troops also found a vehicle at the hospital containing a large number of weapons.
Portal journalists were unable to reach anyone at Shifa Hospital for more than 24 hours.
Hamas said on Thursday that the United States’ claims that the group was using Shifa for military purposes were “a repetition of a blatantly false narrative made clear by the weak and ridiculous performances of the occupying army’s spokesman.”
Israeli officials said Hamas held some of the 240 hostages held by gunmen at the hospital complex on October 7.
On Friday, the Israeli military said soldiers had recovered the body of a captured female soldier in a building near Shifa.
The military had confirmed her death on Tuesday after Hamas released a video of her alive, followed by images of what it said was her body after she was killed in an Israeli attack.
On Thursday, troops recovered the body of another woman hostage, also in a building near Shifa.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hamas’s Quds Force said it attacked Israeli forces in the city of Jenin for several hours on Friday night, unleashing a “torte of fire” and setting ambushes with explosives.
The Israeli military said warplanes in Jenin attacked militants who opened fire on Israeli soldiers. It said at least five of the militants were killed.
At least 178 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. The violence there has heightened fears that territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war could spiral out of control in the wake of the conflict in Gaza.
Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Ari Rabinovitch and Portal bureaus; Writing by Angus MacSwan; Editing by Gareth Jones
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