An airstrike on Friday hit a convoy of Palestinians, killing at least 12, including women and young children, as they tried to flee northern Gaza at the direction of the Israel Defense Forces, ahead of a presumed ground operation in the region. Hamas has blamed the IDF for the strike, which occurred on an evacuation route the military deemed safe.
The strike came hours after the IDF had given the approximately 1.1 million people of northern Gaza 24 hours to evacuate the region. The United Nations said the operation would have dire humanitarian consequences in a part of the world that had already been facing humanitarian disaster before Israel declared it would retaliate for the Hamas attacks on October 7.
The situation on the ground in Gaza is “fast becoming untenable,” Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian aid chief, said in a statement Saturday. On Monday, the Israeli government shut off Gaza’s access to water, electricity, and fuel as part of its declared siege of the region. Gaza has been under blockade by both Israel and Egypt since 2007, and access to basic goods, including food and medicine, is available only via the UN and nongovernmental organizations.
“I fear that the worst is yet to come,” Griffiths added.
Since Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has controlled Gaza since 2007, launched an unprecedented and brutal attack against Israel that killed at least 1,300 people a week ago, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has run multiple sorties over Gaza, dropping at least 6,000 munitions. Those operations have so far killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, including civilians.
Though US officials have reportedly begun to caution Israel to minimize civilian deaths during upcoming operations, Gazans are already vulnerable; roads damaged from the current and previous airstrikes make evacuation slow and dangerous, and many buildings cannot withstand such bombardment because they’ve been affected by previous airstrikes and there’s no capacity…
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