Israel has agreed to a four-hour daily humanitarian pause in areas of the northern Gaza Strip, U.S. officials announced Thursday. The breaks, intended to allow civilians to travel safely to southern Gaza, come amid a worsening humanitarian crisis as Israel continues to bomb one of the world’s most densely populated places.
Israeli officials say the windows have allowed 100,000 people to move so far – but it is not clear whether the safe routes and breaks are enough as more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed and calls for a ceasefire grow louder.
The new agreement is the result of US pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the new policy was due to President Joe Biden’s “personal leadership and diplomacy.” But Biden appeared unable to achieve the lengthy ceasefire he sought to secure the release of the hostages, Politico reported Thursday. The U.S. continues to provide military aid to Israel as it has for decades, and Biden has requested an additional $14.3 billion to fund Iron Dome and other air and missile defense systems.
U.S. officials expect the daily breaks will also allow more humanitarian aid to flow into the Gaza Strip, as residents received only a fraction of basic supplies through aid agencies before the war. Israel has been blockading Gaza for 16 years since Hamas took control of the area, and the United Nations and other organizations have been supplying food, medicine and fuel.
While pauses provide a measure of security for people fleeing Israel’s operations in the northern Gaza Strip, the totality of the humanitarian crisis there remains overwhelming. More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in fighting in Gaza over the past month, and supplies of food, clean water and fuel are dangerously limited in the south, where some 2 million people are seeking refuge as Israel continues its war against Hamas .
Over the past three weeks, Israel has carried out nightly airstrikes and bombing raids in the northern Gaza Strip before launching a phased assault. Israeli forces announced earlier this week that they had encircled Gaza City, the northern population center that they consider the center of Hamas operations.
On Friday, just a day after the humanitarian pauses were announced, fighting broke out around hospitals in Gaza City, including Al-Shifa Hospital, where hundreds of seriously ill and wounded patients are being treated and thousands of civilians are seeking refuge in grave danger and raises doubts about the effectiveness of the humanitarian breaks.
Get people out, get help in
Israel initially gave the estimated 1 million people living in the northern part of the Gaza Strip 24 hours to evacuate to the south so that it could prepare to carry out military operations there, including carrying out airstrikes and destroying tunnels , which are used by Hamas.
According to several humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, the initial evacuation request could not be implemented, especially given the ongoing fighting, poor infrastructure damaged by previous conflicts, the lack of fuel for cars due to the siege of the Israeli declared on October 9th Territory etc sheer number of people moving around in one of the most densely populated places on earth.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have moved south since that initial call to evacuate, although there are thousands more, many seeking refuge in hospitals such as Al-Shifa near Gaza City.
Details about the location and time of the breaks are unclear, as is the number of days the breaks will occur, but Kirby told reporters Thursday that the timing of the breaks will be announced three hours before they begin each day.
Following Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s call for a siege of the Gaza Strip, aid groups and governments such as Qatar and the United States have tried to negotiate for aid to enter the area through the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The siege meant that no food, medicine, medical equipment, drinking water or fuel could enter the area; Electricity and, at times, telecommunications were also interrupted. Without electricity or fuel, Gaza’s water desalination plants cannot produce drinking water and hospitals can only operate at limited capacity despite the urgent need for health services in a war zone.
Since Oct. 9, negotiations have allowed some aid to come through – about 100 trucks of aid a day, according to Special Middle East Humanitarian Envoy David Satterfield, compared with about 500 a day before the war. “Now we know that even 150 trucks a day are just the bare minimum needed to provide basic humanitarian survival assistance,” Satterfield said in a news conference Thursday. “Beyond that, much more is needed. Shelves must be in place to restock commercial goods, bakeries must reopen with whatever supplies they need, such as cooking gas.”
Satterfield also told reporters that fuel supplies had been made available in southern and central Gaza through the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and water desalination plants in southern and central Gaza and two water pipelines from Israel had been restored .
The bigger picture: Gaza is still being devastated, and it’s only getting worse
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 11,000 people have been killed in the fighting so far; More than 4,500 are believed to be children and over 3,000 women, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported in a November 10 bulletin. “On average, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing on Friday: the UN Security Council.
IDF airstrikes and operations remain the primary cause of deaths and casualties; Although the military says it is targeting Hamas terrorists, when explosives are used in populated areas, 90 percent of victims are civilians, according to the United Nations. According to IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the IDF has conducted several operations in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, calling it a Hamas stronghold and a “hotbed of terrorist activity.” “No one can say they didn’t know this was coming,” he said, emphasizing that residents had been told to evacuate for two weeks.
On Saturday, fighting continued near hospitals in Gaza, including al-Shifa, sparking chaos and panic. The IDF has ordered the evacuation of al-Shifa Hospital, saying that Hamas is operating in tunnels beneath the facility, something both Hamas and hospital management deny. According to Doctors Without Borders, Al-Shifa has about 700 beds but is currently treating 5,000 people. Hamas claims the hospital houses about 40,000 people.
Reports of heavy bombardment at al-Shifa continued Friday evening and into Saturday. “The situation in al-Shifa is truly catastrophic,” Ann Taylor, head of the mission in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a statement. “We call on the Israeli government to stop this relentless attack on the health system in the Gaza Strip. Our staff and patients are in Al-Shifa Hospital, where the heavy bombing has not stopped since yesterday.” Doctors Without Borders staff reported constant bombing and shooting at people trying to leave the hospital.
“There is no siege, I repeat no siege, in Shifa Hospital. The east side of the hospital is open for the safe passage of Gazans wishing to leave the hospital,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a briefing on Saturday.
“We speak directly and regularly to hospital staff. The staff at Shifa Hospital has asked that we help the babies in the children’s ward get to a safer hospital tomorrow. We will provide the necessary assistance,” Hagari said. According to the BBC, two babies died in the neonatal unit on Saturday after the hospital ran out of fuel.
And although the IDF says more than 850,000 people have left the northern Gaza Strip so far, “hundreds of thousands of people remaining in the north are struggling to survive,” OCHA reported. “Consuming water from unsafe sources raises serious concerns about dehydration and water-borne diseases. The World Food Program (WFP) has expressed concern about malnutrition and hunger.”
Amid the ongoing devastation, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a ceasefire in an interview with the BBC on Friday. “There is no other solution than first a humanitarian pause and a ceasefire that makes it possible [us] to… protect all civilians who have nothing to do with terrorists.”
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