The United Nations warned on Friday that the cumulative impact of Israel’s actions in Gaza threatened “the future viability of Palestinians as a group” in the war-torn territory.
UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani highlighted “the death, the destruction, the displacement, the denial of access to basic necessities within Gaza and the repeated suggestion that Gazans should leave the territory entirely”.
Taken together, those factors “raise real concerns as to the future viability of Palestinians as a group in Gaza”, she told reporters in Geneva.
The “cumulative effect of what is happening in Gaza today… takes our concerns to a new level”, she said.
Shamdasani in particular pointed to the dire impact Israel’s ongoing airstrikes were having on civilians, lamenting that “a large percentage of fatalities are children and women”.
She told reporters that Israel had launched around 224 strikes on residential buildings and tents housing displaced people between March 18 and April 9.
“In some 36 strikes about which the UN Human Rights Office corroborated information, the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children,” she said.
Shamdasani cited an April 6 strike on a residential building in Deir el-Balah belonging to the Abu Issa family, which reportedly killed one girl, four women and a four-year-old boy.
– ‘Nowhere safe’ –
Even the areas where Palestinians were being instructed to go in the expanding number of Israeli “evacuation orders” were also being subjected to attacks, the rights office spokeswoman said.
The strikes across Gaza were “leaving nowhere safe”, she said.
As an example, Shamdasani took the Israel army’s order for civilians to move to the Al Mawasi area of the southern city of Khan Yunis.
Despite this “strikes continued on tents in that area housing displaced people, with at least 23 such incidents recorded by the office since 18 March”, she said.
Shamdasani referred to a March 31 order by the Israeli military covering all of Rafah, the southernmost governorate in Gaza, followed by a large-scale ground operation.
Israel has said its troops are seizing “large areas” in Gaza and incorporating them into buffer zones cleared of their inhabitants.
“Large areas are being seized and added to Israel’s security zones, leaving Gaza smaller and more isolated,” Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday.
“Let us be clear, these so-called evacuation orders are actually displacement orders, leading to displacement of the population of Gaza into ever-shrinking spaces,” Shamdasani said.
“Permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territories amounts to forcible transfer… and it is a crime against humanity.”
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