Gaza in the dark after Israel bombs power lines
By
17 May 2021
photo: APA images
Human rights groups are calling for an urgent investigation by the International Criminal Court as Israel’s merciless pounding of Gaza enters its second week.
More than 200 Palestinians in the Strip have been killed since last Monday, including 60 children and 34 women, according to Al Mezan, a human rights group based in the territory.
Three of the women were pregnant when they were killed, according to the UN’s human rights office.
The fatality count is expected to rise as people remain under the rubble and unaccounted for two days after heavy airstrikes on residential areas of Gaza City overnight Saturday.
🚨 As expected, in the past 24 hrs, casualties continued to increase:
– 25 deaths, incl. 7 children & 3 women;
– 60 injuries, incl. 31 children & 7 women;
– 13 residential buildings destroyed, resulting in mass evacuations and displacement of hundreds of Palestinian families. pic.twitter.com/B0ADB5VZyQ— Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (@AlMezanCenter) May 17, 2021
Nearly 1,000 others have been injured and some 58,000 people have been displaced within Gaza after Israel destroyed around 100 residential buildings over the past week.
The buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes include six towers, “three of which were completely destroyed,” Al Mezan said.
Displaced persons are seeking shelter at dozens of schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees.
As Al Mezan notes, Israel targeted UNRWA schools used as shelters in previous military offensives in Gaza, killing civilians displaced from their homes.
Al Mezan said that UNRWA had not officially opened their schools as shelters and that displaced persons are living “in classrooms without mattresses or blankets and without the provision of essential services, such as sufficient drinking water, food and adequate toilets.”
The rights group added that “most live on what little food they have brought with them, or on food given by neighboring residents or provided by charitable associations and popular committees for refugees.”
Concern is mounting over rapidly deteriorating humanitarian conditions in densely populated Gaza, where only one percent of the population has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and infection rates are high.
“Since it is difficult for forcibly displaced people to uphold preventive safety measures,” Al Mezan stated, “those in shelters are threatened by a health and humanitarian disaster, which in turn threatens society in general with further coronavirus outbreaks.”
Several human rights groups have demanded that Israeli government and military bodies “reverse the decision to close Gaza’s crossings [and] allow movement of people and passage of aid,” Gisha, a legal center based in Israel, stated.
The humanitarian and economic situation in Gaza was already dire with a severe land, sea and air blockade imposed by Israel beginning in 2007 and multiple massive military offensives since then.
As a direct result of Israel’s siege and attacks, Gaza has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world and more than half of its population of two million, two-thirds of whom are refugees, live in poverty.
Some Palestinians who lost their homes in Israel’s 2014 attack had yet to rebuild when the new one began. Israeli restrictions on building materials have made rebuilding a very difficult ordeal.
After the 2014 offensive, Palestinians said that a ceasefire wasn’t enough and demanded that the blockade on Gaza be lifted and for an end to Israel’s impunity.
While the devastating siege remains in place, the International Criminal Court announced earlier this year that it had opened an investigation into war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Israel’s 2014 attacks a primary focus of the probe
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