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euro mediterranean human rights monitor
'Where Can People Go?': Israel Kills 28 in Latest Attack on Gaza School-Turned-Shelter
"By striking these supposed shelters, Israel is intensifying the already catastrophic situation for civilians, many of whom have nowhere left to escape," a human rights group said.
Oct 10, 2024
An Israeli airstrike on a school in central Gaza killed at least 28 people on Thursday, including civilian men, women, and children.
The victims were among the million displaced Palestinians seeking shelter in the city of Deir Al-Balah in Gaza more than one year into Israel's assault on the enclave. The attack came after Israel issued new evacuation orders for northern Gaza on Monday as it escalated its bombardment and invasion of the area, in particular the Jabalia refugee camp.
"By striking these supposed shelters, Israel is intensifying the already catastrophic situation for civilians, many of whom have nowhere left to escape," Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on social media in response to the airstrike.
"This is not just another attack—it's a systematic assault aimed at wiping out entire Palestinian family lines."
Or, as Iftekhar Hammouda, a woman sheltering at the school askedCNN, "Where can people go? Where do they flee? They hit us at our homes, at our tents, on the streets, and at the schools."
The Palestine Red Crescent Society wrote on social media that it had responded to an attack on the Rafida School that killed 28 people and wounded 54.
The death toll was later verified by local hospitals, according to CNN. A rescue worker told the news agency that relatives were searching for their loved ones "in pieces."
Unverified video footage posted online included graphic images of wounded survivors as well as rescue workers handling body parts of those ripped apart by the bombing described as a "horrific massacre."
One of the survivors searching for family, Ayman Abou Khousa, told CNN, "We are dying every day," adding, "The world has sold us out."
Al Jazeera described the scene at Al-Aqsa Hospital, where the wounded were taken for treatment:
The situations continue to be very difficult inside the emergency department where medical staff are pretty much unable to provide any necessary medical intervention to save lives.
The bomb that was dropped by the F-16 packed with nails, packed with pieces of metals and shrapnel that cut through the flesh and caused severe bleeding.
Many of the victims arriving at the hospital, their blood filled up the courtyard of the hospital the moment the door of the ambulance vehicle opened.
In a statement reported by Reuters, the Israeli military said Thursday's bombardment was a "precise strike on terrorists" who had established a command center in the school. The Israel Defense Forces have long justified their attacks on civilian infrastructure by claiming Hamas uses schools and hospitals as staging grounds for attacks, a charge Hamas denies.
Hammouda told CNN that there was no Hamas presence at the school. Gaza's Government Media Office said the majority of those wounded or killed in the attack were women and children.
"The occupation army was aware that this school included thousands of displaced children and women who were displaced from their homes and whose civilian neighborhoods were bombed," the media office said in a statement reported by Al Jazeera. "It chose the time of the bombing at the peak time when these children and women were moving to get their daily food."
The office continued: "We condemn the Israeli occupation's commission of this new massacre and the ongoing massacres against civilians, children, and women, and we call on all countries of the world to condemn these ongoing crimes against the displaced, against civilians, against children and women."
Israel has bombed almost 85% of the schools in Gaza since it launched its offensive on the strip following Hamas' attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Recent attacks include two airstrikes last month on a United Nations school in central Gaza that killed at least 18 and a bombing of a school in Gaza City in August that killed at least 12.
"Since Israel began committing genocide in Gaza, it has bombed at least 190 shelters. Places meant to be safe havens have become death traps for families forcibly driven from their homes," The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) wrote on social media.
"In the past year, Israel has deliberately targeted areas where families have taken refuge, knowing they include children and the elderly," the nonprofit continued. "This is not just another attack—it's a systematic assault aimed at wiping out entire Palestinian family lines."
IMEU added that the U.S. government was currently complicit in these attacks: "The U.S. continues to supply Israel with weapons, giving it the means to carry out these war crimes which are made possible by American support. The president must act to end Israel's genocidal campaign now."
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Israeli Snipers Firing at 'Anyone Who Is Moving' in Khan Younis
The southern Gaza city is the latest region where Israeli forces have issued an evacuation order, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Jul 25, 2024
At least 129 people have been killed in the last five days of Israeli shelling and artillery fire in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where the Israel Defense Forces earlier this week gave people "a couple of minutes only" to evacuate earlier this week, according to Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary, before the bombardment began.
Al Jazeera reported on Thursday that "the vast majority of dead and injured are women and children," as Israeli snipers have also been deployed in the city and are firing at Palestinians indiscriminately.
The snipers "are shooting anyone who is moving," wrote Tareq Abu Azzoum in a dispatch, reporting that the eastern part of Khan Younis is the main target of Israel's current assault.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) noted that the latest evacuation order reduced the area that Israel has claimed is a "humanitarian zone," as the order covered about 15% of al-Mawasi, where people from cities including Rafah and Gaza City have fled in recent months as the IDF has launched assaults in those cities.
The group told Al Jazeera that "there is no more space, even for a single tent, in the so-called 'humanitarian area' of al-Mawasi because of the overwhelming number of people displaced there."
Israel's reported indiscriminate assault on the city has included medical workers, said PRCS, which posted a video on social media Thursday of an ambulance that had been hit by live bullets fired by the IDF while medics were transporting an injured person.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor noted on Monday that the true death toll in Khan Younis—as with the rest of Gaza—may not be known for months, "with many victims remaining trapped under the rubble and in the streets, where rescue workers have not been able to retrieve their bodies."
The group also said the IDF had perpetrated "a kind of deception of the residents" of Khan Younis and villages in the area, including Bali Suhaila, where soldiers entered "amid very violent bombardment, even though the Israeli army had said in its orders that the displacement was going to be temporary."
The forced evacuation, false information about the order, and shrinking of the humanitarian zone were "all part of Israel's media disinformation campaign and psychological warfare tactics, since military assaults on forcibly displaced people and their tents have occurred continually in this area for several weeks now, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries," the Euro-Med Monitor.
The reports of indiscriminate shooting by snipers also bolster an account given by Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis in April, to CBS News earlier this week.
"I had sniper bullets," said Perlmutter. "I have children that were shot twice... I have two children that I have photographs of, that were shot so perfectly in the chest... and directly on the side of the head on the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best sniper. And they're dead-center shots."
Perlmutter is among nearly four dozen doctors and nurses who wrote to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and First Lady Jill Biden on Thursday, describing what they saw while volunteering at hospitals across Gaza since Israel began bombarding the enclave and blocking nearly all humanitarian aid, including medications and medical supplies, nearly 10 months ago.
"Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict," wrote the medical workers. "However, every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest."
"We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget," they added. "We cannot believe that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen."
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UN to Warn Half a Million Gazans Facing 'Catastrophic' Food Insecurity
"The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now," said one advocate.
Jun 24, 2024
More than 1 in 5 people in the Gaza Strip are "facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity" amid Israel's relentless assault and siege against the Palestinian territory, according to a draft report set to be published Tuesday by the United Nations' hunger monitoring system.
The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Acute Food Insecurity Special Snapshot—which was previewed by various news agencies—says that more than 495,000 Gazans—who already face "an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion"—are expected to suffer the highest level of starvation over the coming months.
The draft report states that while a sharp increase in food aid in northern Gaza in March and April can be credited with "likely averting a famine," the situation is "deteriorating again following renewed hostilities."
"A high risk of famine persists across the whole of the Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted," IPC noted.
The IPC draft report also says more than half of all Gaza households had to sell or swap clothing in order to obtain food, and that the majority of Gazan families often "do not have any food to eat in the house, and over 20% go entire days and nights without eating."
"The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, an Oregon-based humanitarian NGO, toldThe Guardian that "people are enduring subhuman conditions resorting to desperate measures like boiling weeds, eating animal feed, and exchanging clothes for money to stave off hunger and keep their children alive."
"The humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly, and the specter of famine continues to hang over Gaza," she added. "The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now. The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Although the IPC stopped short of the rare step of declaring a famine in Gaza, it warned that "the recent trajectory is negative and highly unstable."
"Should this continue, the improvements seen in April could be rapidly reversed," the agency added.
The IPC's famine review panel previously said there is not enough data to make a determination on whether there is a famine in Gaza since research was being blocked by "conflict and humanitarian access constraints."
The Geneva-based group Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Monday that "the Famine Review Committee's inability to declare the current food situation in the Gaza Strip to be a famine does not negate the existence of famine in the strip, as pockets of famine are forming and spreading among different age groups, particularly children, and there is a noticeable increase in deaths from hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases."
"The committee's failure to declare the existence of a famine is solely related to its inability to provide certain technical information because of illegal Israeli restrictions and policies that aim to conceal evidence related to the crimes it commits and prevent criminal investigations into them by independent U.N. and international committees, particularly by preventing these committees from entering the strip," the group added.
U.N. World Food Program Executive Director Cindy McCain said last month that "full-blown famine" had taken hold in Gaza and was spreading south. According to Gaza officials, at least 40 people—mostly children—have died from malnutrition and dehydration during the 262-day Israeli onslaught. Almost all of the victims are from northern Gaza.
Israel began bombing, and later invaded, Gaza after Hamas-led attacks left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead and over 240 others kidnapped on October 7. At least some of the victims were killed by Israeli forces in so-called "friendly fire" incidents, according to Israeli and international media reports.
Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 37,626 Palestinians—most of them women and children—in Gaza, while wounding over 86,000 others, according to Palestinian and international agencies. At least 11,000 people, including over 4,000 children, are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings.
Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food and a law professor at the University of Oregon, said in late February that Israel is committing genocide by intentionally starving Gazans. Israel's siege—and Israeli attacks on humanitarian aid shipments, workers, and recipients—are being reviewed by the International Court of Justice as part of a South Africa-led genocide case backed by over 30 countries and regional blocs.
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