GAZA/JERUSALEM, (Reuters) – A global rights group accused Israel today of committing a war crime by starving people in the Gaza Strip who continued to face relentless attacks in the war with Hamas militants.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no let-up in the bombardment and siege of the densely-populated coastal enclave, where buildings lie in ruins, hunger is rife, and health authorities say around 19,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Despite rising global pressure to protect civilians, who have nowhere to go, Israel is bent on eliminating the Hamas group behind an Oct. 7 rampage that killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
U.S.-based Human Right Watch (HRW) said Israeli forces were deliberately blocking delivery of water, food and fuel, razing agricultural areas and depriving Gaza’s 2.3 million people of objects indispensable for their survival.
“The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip,” it said in a report. “World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime.”
There was no immediate response to the HRW report from Israel, which has denied targeting civilians and says it is trying to facilitate aid to innocents while choking off supplies to thousands of Hamas fighters operating from tunnels.
DEATHS MOUNT
The HRW report came after Pope Francis accused Israel of “terrorism”, deploring the reported killing by the Israeli military of two Christian women in a church complex.
Israel has not responded to his comments.
In the latest bombardments, 90 Palestinians died in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on Sunday, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. Hamas Aqsa radio reported an attack on Gaza’s main hospital, Al Shifa.
In Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, medics said 12 Palestinians had been killed and dozens wounded, while in Rafah in the south, an Israeli air strike on a house left at least four people dead.
The sound of the explosion was “as powerful as an earthquake”, Mahmoud Jarbou, who lives nearby, told Reuters.
An Israeli tank shell hit the maternity building inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killing a 13-year-old girl named Dina Abu Mehsen, according to Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra.
Al-Qidra said that Abu Mehsen had previously lost her father, mother, two of her siblings, and one of her legs during a previous shelling.
The Israeli military released the names of four more soldiers killed in combat in Gaza, making it 126 dead in the strip since its ground invasion began in late October.
AID NEEDED
Residents reported gunfire between Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters in various spots up and down narrow, coastal Gaza, with the militants saying they had launched a series of attacks.
Reuters was unable to verify the state of operations or claims from either side.
With Gazans desperate for basics, the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza has opened for aid trucks for the first time since the outbreak of war, officials said, adding to some supplies coming in via the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
The United Nations Security Council could vote on Monday on a proposal to demand that Israel and Hamas allow better aid access – via land, sea and air – with monitoring of deliveries.
Diplomats said the draft resolution hinges on final negotiations between the United States, a close ally of Israel with veto power in the council, and the United Arab Emirates, which has drafted the text.
Increased violence also continued in the occupied West Bank, where four Palestinians were killed in an ongoing Israeli army raid on the Faraa refugee camp, the Palestinian health ministry said on Monday.