Warnings of famine in the Gaza Strip have increased after nearly 22 months of war, with the death toll mounting and no signs of an imminent breakthrough in truce talks.
As the Gaza health ministry on Tuesday announced that the death toll had topped 60,000, there have been efforts to get more aid into the war-ravaged territory, where needs are vast.
The following are the latest key developments in the war:
– Calls for Hamas to disarm –
Arab countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt joined calls Tuesday for Hamas to disarm and end its rule of Gaza, in a bid to end the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.
Seventeen countries plus the European Union and Arab League threw their weight behind a seven-page text agreed at a United Nations conference on reviving the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
“In the context of ending the war in Gaza, Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State,” said the declaration.
– Famine ‘unfolding’ –
UN-backed experts warned Tuesday that a “worst-case scenario” famine is “now unfolding” in Gaza that cannot be reversed unless humanitarian groups get immediate and “unimpeded” access.
The Rome-based Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said airdrops over Gaza, announced by various countries in recent days, would not be enough to avert the “humanitarian catastrophe”.
“The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in the Gaza Strip,” said the IPC, a grouping of NGOs and institutions that serves as the world’s main monitor for gauging malnutrition, in a statement.
The World Food Programme, UNICEF and the Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that time was running out and that Gaza was “on the brink of a full-scale famine”.
“We need to flood Gaza with large-scale food aid, immediately and without obstruction, and keep it flowing each and every day to prevent mass starvation,” WFP executive director Cindy McCain said in a joint statement from the agencies.
– Toll –
Gaza’s civil defence agency on Wednesday said that Israeli operations killed 14 people in the Palestinian territory.
Six of them were killed and dozens were injured “due to Israeli occupation forces’ gunfire in the Al-Shakoush area near aid centres northwest of Rafah city,” the agency’s spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
The Hamas-run territory’s health ministry said Israel’s campaign had now killed 60,034 people, most of them civilians.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, the majority civilians, based on an AFP tally of official figures.
– Britain to recognise Palestine –
Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Tuesday that Britain would formally recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel took various “substantive steps”, including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israel must “end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect” of a two-state solution, he added.
Starmer’s move, paired with Paris also saying it will recognise a Palestinian state in September, would make the two European allies the first G7 nations to do so.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the move, saying it “rewards Hamas’s monstrous terrorism”.
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