Gaza’s lack of fuel, food shortages, and aid for the humanitarian crisis, says the UNRWA Gaza spokeswoman Cindy McCain
TEL AVIV, Israel — The streets of Gaza are empty of cars. Meat suppliers have no refrigeration and many bakeries are closed. Doctors are performing operations.
Since last weekend, 62 aid trucks have entered Gaza, but none of them have delivered fuel because Israel has blocked it because it could be used by Hamas.
Aid groups have warned of the lack of fuel, saying it has reached a critical point. UNRWA says it could run out of fuel within a day.
The situation in Gaza is not good, and things get worse by the hour every hour, said a UNRWA spokeswoman.
Touma said fuel is needed for U.N. vehicles to collect aid from the border and distribute it across Gaza. Fuel is also used to power hospitals, where doctors have warned that people will die if life-saving medical equipment is forced to go out of operation.
Most of the bakeries in Gaza have stopped making bakeries, including many that contract with the World Food Programme. The U.N. says that at least 10 bakeries have been destroyed or struck in the last week.
For those that remain intact and operational, long lines form daily, exposing people to airstrikes. Meat suppliers are starting to be affected by the lack of electricity and fuel for generators, according to the U.N.
In response to an UNRWA appeal for fuel on the social media site X, the Israel Defense Forces responded with a satellite image of what it described as fuel tanks located in Gaza.
The supply situation speaks to the relative sophistication of Hamas as a fighting force — an axiom among military professionals is that while amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Yet with Gazans facing a humanitarian catastrophe, Hamas’s stockpiles raise questions about what responsibility, if any, it has to the civilian population.
During an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered, Cindy McCain, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme said she wasn’t optimistic about negotiations over allowing further aid into Gaza.
“Nothing’s working. Nothing’s happening. Both sides are not talking,” McCain said. “They’re not dealing with the issue of people who are going to die. They’re gonna die as a result of no food, no water, no ability to support themselves.”
The Fate of Gaza: The Assault on the Aid Groups of Hamas in the Context of the Recent Israeli Insurgency
Over the last few days, Israel has increased the intensity of its attacks on Gaza, with hundreds of airstrikes each night. Health officials in Gaza say there is a death toll over 7,000.
“The Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel. It is against their interest if that doesn’t happen.
The Palestinian agency that produces the death tolls, the Ministry of Health, is nominally operated by the Palestinian Authority, which provides funding and supplies and maintains close contact with hospitals in Gaza. Hamas governs Gaza and likely has close oversight over information Gaza health officials put out. The casualty counts are broadly considered to be correct by humanitarian groups and have been cited by the State Department.
Gaza’s borders are effectively closed, limiting the ability of aid groups and journalists to access the territory in order to independently verify the numbers.
As the conflict nears the end of its third week, more than 200 hostages still remain in Hamas captivity. The families of hostages and the US officials have been lobbying for Israeli forces to hold off on the invasion to give more time to negotiate their release.
Hundreds of US citizens are stuck in Gaza. Abood Okal, a Massachusetts resident, told NPR that he and his family have been sharing a house with many others in southern Rafah.
A Palestinian Homeowner in Gaza, Living Under the Presence of a “Second Wave” of Israel’s Blockade
They sleep on the floor, without running water and only a couple hours a day of electricity from the home’s solar panels. On Wednesday, they ran out of milk for his son, he said.
“We feel fortunate every morning that we wake up and we have lived for another day,” Okal said. It’s becoming harder and harder to find hope with everything else around us.
For the last 16 years, Gaza has been blockaded after Israel’s strict policy toward the territory. Israel says this is to contain attacks by Hamas after it took over Gaza in 2007 from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, now based solely in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu’s policy was to maintain political division between the territories so they wouldn’t unite into a Palestinian state.
One of the four Israeli hostages released by Hamas claimed that the group provided them with medicine, hygiene products and other items. The blockade imposed by Israel, aided by Egypt, has caused a shortage in Gaza more than two weeks since an attack by a terrorist group.
The Arab and Western officials who described Hamas’s supply situation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were disclosing information gleaned from human sources, communications intercepts and other streams of intelligence. They said the supplies are kept underground, and that the details on Hamas’s supplies were hard to come by.
Hamas and the islamic jihad group of Gaza: a new war with Israel sparked by israel, Palestinians and Israelis
Harel Chorev, a Palestinian affairs expert at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, says Hamas’ goal is to break down Israeli society, which it sees as a colonialist people without real roots in the land.
“They always believe that all of us should go back to Germany and Poland and whatever, even if we are from Morocco,” Chorev says. It’s really to break our spirit.
Most of the Palestinians who lived in Gaza when Israel was founded came from refugees who were upsexed from their homes. Failed rounds of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have driven support for what Palestinians call armed resistance to Israeli occupation and brutality against the population.
The officials in Israel say there is an ideology of hate against Jews. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas “worse than ISIS.” Israel, the United States and other countries recognize Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad group as terrorists.
There are around 20,000 to 25,000 militants in Hamas’ Qassam militant wing, according to Gaza experts Samir Ghattas of the Cairo-based Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies and National Security, and Harel Chorev of Tel Aviv University. Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds brigades are believed to have around 5,000 to 6,000 members.
The Hamas-Centric Fighters, who Sparked a New War with Israel, Reveal a Gazan Soldier’s Footprint
In the massacre, palatial homes were torn apart: kitchens turned upside down, Rummikub tiles and a man’s walker were strewn over the floors. In one house the smell of a blood-soaked mattress lingers.
Israel’s army said it collected terabytes of footage of the attacks from cameras recovered from Gaza terrorists, as well as victims’ phones and neighborhood security cameras.
Gaza health officials say that more than 7,000 Palestinians have died in the current war between Israel and Hamas and new details about the men who sparked it are starting to emerge.
“We want to get the attention of the world,” said Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau. Look at the Palestinians. We are under oppression and torture and collective punishment all the time. This is our message to everyone.
The senior Hamas official toldNPR that the group staged the attack to raise awareness about Israel’s punishing restrictions on Gaza. Hamas leaders say they took hostages to get a grand exchange of prisoners with Israel.
Both his neighbor and his father spoke on condition of anonymity, and referred to Mohammed only by his first name, out of concern Israel could target them.
Source: New details emerge about Hamas-led fighters who sparked a new war with Israel
Mohammed, a Hamas-Led Military Veteran, and the New War Israel-Israel (Npr/2023/10/08836319/Israel-Militants-Videos)
His dad told NPR that he hopes God is kind with him. ” Being a martyr is a huge thing, and this is what he pursued.” I hope God accepts him as a martyr.”
He said Mohammed had made it a mile or two inside Israel when an Israeli aircraft shot him — five bullets to the chest, one near the neck — and recited the shahada, Islam’s affirmation of faith, before he died from his wounds.
A neighbor said Mohammed vanished on the day of the attacks. His family only learned of what happened the next day, when a militant came back from Israel with Mohammed’s cellphone and personal effects.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew that he was a member of Islamic Jihad, a small Palestinian militia that is closely aligned with Iran.
His neighbor said Mohammed had led an ordinary life. He was not able to finish his high school exam. He started a business selling food products after he retired as a taxi driver, and hosted a big wedding for his family and friends.
They were young. They were well-trained. They were given specific orders. They had a mix of motivations, tied to the unique conditions and ideologies that permeate life in Gaza.
Source: New details emerge about Hamas-led fighters who sparked a new war with Israel
Hamas in Gaza: Israeli training of Hezbollah fighters and Israel’s knowledge of the fighters’ methods of combat
The videos also capture the men’s heavy breathing, nervous pacing and shouted instructions. In one of the most gruesome scenes to be published, a man tries to behead his wounded friend with a garden hoe, after calling out for a knife.
Ghattas, the Gaza expert in Cairo, believes elite combatants in Gaza traveled on false passports to countries like Lebanon or Iran where they learned the combat methods of the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah. He believes they returned to Gaza to train the squads who carried out the attacks.
The Israeli army states that there was Iranian involvement in foreign training. Iran does not deny there was coordination.
Israel released photographs of pamphlets it says are from the Hamas fighters and also provided interrogation videos of several of the attackers it has captured.