Israel gives Gaza City residents 4 hours to leave, UN human rights boss starts Middle East trip
- Tel Aviv says its forces have surrounded the city, home to a third of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, and are poised to attack it soon
- Meanwhile, the UN’s Volker Turk began a five-day visit to the Middle East on human rights violations, amid Israel’s escalation in the enclave
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Israel gave civilians still trapped inside freshly encircled Gaza City a four-hour window to leave on Tuesday and escaping residents said they passed tanks in position to storm it.
Tel Aviv says its forces have surrounded Gaza City, home to a third of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, and are poised to attack it soon in their campaign to annihilate the Hamas Islamists who stormed Israeli towns exactly a month ago.
Dozens of people were reported killed by overnight Israeli air strikes in the Gazan cities of Khan Younis, Rafah and Deir al-Balah, the BBC said.
The cities are in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s military told civilians to move.
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is to set up a field hospital in the Gaza Strip, official media said.
Five aircraft flew out of Abu Dhabi for Arish in northern Egypt carrying equipment and supplies for the 150-bed facility, WAM news agency said late Monday.
An official told AFP there was no immediate information on how the equipment will be transferred to Gaza, where there is only one operational border point, the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing near Arish.
The hospital’s facilities will include anaesthetics and surgery, gynaecology and intensive care units “catering to both children and adults”, WAM said.
Over 4,000 children are among the 10,328 to have died in Gaza, its Hamas-run health ministry said on Tuesday.
The war erupted when Hamas militants crossed from Gaza into southern Israel on October 7, killing some 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials, with over 200 people taken hostage.
In retaliation, Israel has unleashed relentless strikes and sent in ground troops with the aim of crushing the militants in the Gaza Strip.
The United Arab Emirates, a wealthy Gulf monarchy, broke with Arab tradition to establish ties with Israel in the 2020 Abraham Accords agreements.
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Dozens killed as Gaza’s largest refugee camp hit by Israeli air strike targeting ‘Hamas terrorists’
It has previously announced plans to bring about 1,000 Palestinian children and their families from the Gaza Strip for treatment at UAE hospitals.
A month into the war, the dead body of a toddler is carried out of a bombed house. A woman weeps over a row of corpses wrapped in white.
The latest casualties arrive in hospitals already overflowing with the wounded and displaced, and people queue for hours to get a few litres of water to share with dozens of others.
Palestinians stuck inside the besieged enclave face daily suffering of a scale, intensity and repetitiveness that have pushed some into fury and despair.
“I swear we are waiting for death. It will be better than living. We are waiting for death at each moment. It’s a suspended death,” said Abu Jihad, a middle-aged resident of Khan Younis in the south of the tiny, densely populated territory.
He was standing in a street close to a house flattened by an air strike that shook the neighbourhood awake in the middle of the night.
“We are not living. We need a solution. Either kill us all or let us live,” he said, raging at Israel and at the wider world which he accused of being silent and impotent.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, began a five-day visit to the Middle East on Tuesday to engage with government officials and civil society on the human rights violations taking place in Gaza.
“It has been one full month of carnage, of incessant suffering, bloodshed, destruction, outrage and despair,” Turk said. “Human rights violations are at the root of this escalation and human rights play a central role in finding a way out of this vortex of pain.”
Turk is in Cairo on Tuesday and will visit Rafah, on the border with Gaza, on Wednesday, before he travels to the Jordanian capital of Amman on Thursday, his office said.
Additional reporting by Reuters
