On December 4, 100 aid trucks carrying humanitarian supplies and 69,000 liters of fuel entered Gaza from Egypt, about the same as the previous day. This is well below the daily average of 170 trucks and 110,000 liters of fuel that arrived during the humanitarian pause on November 2430.
The Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories stated that “the necessary conditions for providing assistance to the people of the Gaza Strip do not exist. If possible, an even more hellish scenario will emerge, a scenario in which humanitarian operations may not be possible.” What we see today is shelters without capacity, a health system on its knees, lack of clean water, lack of adequate sanitation and poor nutrition for people already mentally and physically exhausted: a classic formula for epidemics and a health disaster for the public”.
On December 3, the Israeli military designated an area of approximately 20% of the city of Khan Younis for immediate evacuation. Before hostilities began, around 117,000 people lived in this area. The area also includes 21 emergency shelters housing around 50,000 internally displaced people, the vast majority of whom were previously displaced from the north, meaning those already displaced will be displaced again.
Residents were told to move to the town of Al Fukhari, east of Khan Younis, and to the already crowded Ash Shaboura and Tell As Sultan neighborhoods in Rafah.
On December 3 and 4, heavy shelling and fighting occurred around three of the four partially operational hospitals in the north of Gaza and Nasser Hospital in the south. Some of them were hit directly, resulting in casualties and damage to hospital facilities. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), hospitals are “inundated with a stream of corpses.”
The death toll since October 7 and until the resumption of hostilities on December 1 includes at least 198 Palestinian doctors, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; 130 UN staff; 77 journalists and media professionals.