United Nations relief chief Tom Fletcher on Monday called on the international community to defend international humanitarian law (IHL), demand the protection of all civilians and break the cycle of violence in Gaza. Meanwhile, a growing number of legal experts and organizations are concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza and those targeting Palestinians as a group in the territory amount to genocide.
“In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued the first set of provisional orders, in the case on the application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip. Less than a year later, the sustained intensity of violence means that there is nowhere that civilians in Gaza are safe,” said Flechter, who is the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.
“North Gaza has been under a near-total siege for more than two months, raising the specter of famine. South Gaza is extremely overcrowded, creating horrific living conditions and even greater humanitarian needs as winter sets in,” he said, noting that schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure had been reduced to rubble.
Fletcher said Gaza is now the most dangerous place to deliver humanitarian aid, in a year in which more humanitarian workers have been killed than at any other time on record.
“Across Gaza, Israeli airstrikes on densely populated areas continue, including on areas where Israeli forces have ordered people to move, causing destruction, displacement and death,” he said.
Ongoing indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) continue to kill large numbers of civilians, including children. In addition to killing, maiming and injuring children, the war in Gaza is taking a heavy toll on their mental health.
As of December 24, Israeli security forces have killed more than 45,300 people and wounded more than 107,700 others, most of them civilians, since the war began last October. It is estimated that more than 14,500 children are among the dead. More than 10,000 people, including thousands of children, are missing and presumed dead.
One quarter of the injured in Gaza - some 26,000 Palestinians - are estimated to require lifelong specialized rehabilitation and supportive care, including those with severe limb injuries, amputations, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and severe burns.
The fatalities include at least 359 aid workers, 258 UN staff, 1057 health workers and 188 journalists. Since last October, more than 160,000 people, or more than 7 percent of Gaza's population, have been killed, wounded or reported missing in Israel's attacks on Gaza.
For more than fourteen months, an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe has been raging in Gaza, with people dying from widespread attacks and starvation.
Leading UN officials have called the situation in Gaza "apocalyptic," "hell on earth," a "dystopian nightmare," and "beyond catastrophic. They have said that the humanitarian community is "running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza."
Gaza is on the brink of famine, with more than 2 million people facing severe food shortages amid high rates of disease, inadequate shelter, and limited access to safe water and sanitation. Some 1.9 million people - 90 percent of Gaza's total population - have been displaced by Israeli military attacks or Israeli evacuation orders, including people who have been forced to flee dozens of times.
Fletcher said that despite the massive humanitarian needs, it has become almost impossible to deliver even a fraction of the aid that is so urgently needed.
“The Israeli authorities continue to deny us meaningful access – over 100 requests to access North Gaza denied since 6 October. We are also now seeing the breakdown of law and order and the systematic armed looting of our supplies by local gangs,” he said.
Gaza has descended into a state of anarchy, further hampering efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to millions of Palestinians in desperate need. In the northern Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has been conducting a ground offensive since October 6.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned on Tuesday that recent attacks on hospitals in North Gaza governorate are having a devastating impact on civilians remaining in the besieged areas.
Despite active fighting and Israeli restrictions on access to the governorate, two UN-led humanitarian missions successfully entered the besieged areas of North Gaza on December 20. However, these were the only two of the eight missions requested by the UN to be allowed access to North Gaza between December 18 and 22 that were approved.
North Gaza remains under an almost total siege. Since the beginning of December, the Israeli authorities have rejected 48 out of 52 UN attempts to coordinate humanitarian access, while four approved movements have all been obstructed. None of the UN-coordinated access attempts have been fully facilitated.
On Thursday, the medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians over the past 14 months, the dismantling of the health system and other essential infrastructure, the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial of humanitarian aid are destroying the conditions of life in Gaza.
“People in Gaza are struggling to survive apocalyptic conditions, but nowhere is safe, no one is spared, and there is no exit from this shattered enclave,” said Christopher Lockyear, MSF secretary general, in a statement coinciding with the release of a new MSF report on Gaza.
MSF reiterated its urgent call on all parties for an immediate ceasefire to save lives and allow the flow of humanitarian aid. The humanitarian organization said Israel must stop its targeted and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and its allies must act immediately to protect Palestinian lives and uphold the rules of war.
“The recent military offensive in the north is a stark illustration of the brutal war the Israeli forces are waging on Gaza, and we are seeing clear signs of ethnic cleansing as Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped, and bombed,” Lockyear said.
He added that the signs of ethnic cleansing and the ongoing devastation – including mass killings, severe physical and mental health injuries, forced displacement, and impossible conditions of life for Palestinians under siege and bombardment – are “undeniable”.
“What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza,” he said.
Genocide is a term used to describe violent crimes committed against a group with the intent to destroy the existence of the group, in whole or in part. According to the Genocide Convention, acts amounting to genocide include deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.
On Thursday, the international rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report that Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted living conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in the Gaza Strip by deliberately depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.
“In doing so, Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide,” HRW said, stressing that the pattern of behavior, along with statements suggesting that some Israeli officials wanted to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, could amount to the crime of genocide.
This comes after the human rights group Amnesty International (AI) said in a major report released on December 5 that Israel is committing acts of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Among its findings, the rights group said Israel has deliberately obstructed or denied the entry and delivery of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid.
Both reports add to the growing body of evidence that Israeli policies and military actions targeting Palestinians as a group amount to genocide, one of the worst crimes known to humankind.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said on March 25 that there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide. Albanese found strong evidence that Israel's executive and military leaders and soldiers are acting with genocidal intent in Gaza.
After analyzing Israel's actions and patterns of violence in its onslaught on Gaza, the dehumanizing rhetoric of senior Israeli officials, and the actions of soldiers on the ground, the Special Rapporteur's report found that the threshold indicating Israel's commission of genocide had been met.
A report released on November 14, by the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs in the Occupied Territories found that Israel's war in Gaza was consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions deliberately imposed on the Palestinians there.
The Committee said that by imposing a siege on Gaza, obstructing humanitarian aid, and targeting and killing civilians and aid workers, despite repeated UN appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and Security Council resolutions, Israel is deliberately causing death, hunger, and serious injury, using starvation as a method of warfare, and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian people.
International humanitarian law requires Israel to ensure that the basic needs of the people of Gaza are met. This includes ensuring that Gaza is supplied with sufficient water, food, medical supplies and other basic necessities to enable the population to survive.
However, since Israel imposed a full siege on the Gaza Strip on October 9 last year, the amount of aid entering the enclave has never been sufficient to meet the needs on the ground. For more than a year, Israel has deliberately failed to provide or even facilitate the delivery of essential supplies to the 2.1 million people still living in Gaza.
The blocking of humanitarian aid defies numerous UN General Assembly and UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access, and also ignores the International Court of Justice which has issued several binding interim orders regarding humanitarian aid.