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  • Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza tops 20,000


Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza tops 20,000

This handout picture released by the Israeli army on December 22, 2023 shows a soldier operating in the Gaza Strip, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (AFP)
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Updated 24 December 2023
AP
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Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza tops 20,000

  • Deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1 percent of the territory’s pre-war population
  • The Israeli offensive has displaced nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people
Updated 24 December 2023
AP

RAFAH, Gaza Strip: Israel’s war to destroy Hamas has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said Friday, as Israel expanded its offensive and ordered tens of thousands more people to leave their homes.
The deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1 percent of the territory’s prewar population — the latest indication of the 11-week-old conflict’s staggering human toll.
Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history, displacing nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday from the United Nations and other agencies.
Israel declared war after Hamas militants stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking some 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to keep up the fight until Hamas is destroyed and removed from power in Gaza and all the hostages are freed.
After many delays, the UN Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution Friday calling for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.
The United States won the removal of a tougher call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas. It abstained in the vote, as did Russia, which wanted the stronger language. The resolution was the first on the war to make it through the council after the US vetoed two earlier ones that called for humanitarian pauses and a full cease-fire.
ISRAEL VOWS TO KEEP UP PRESSURE ON HAMAS
The US also negotiated the removal of language that would have given the UN authority to inspect aid going into Gaza, something Israel says it must do to ensure material does not reach Hamas.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, thanked the US for its support and sharply criticized the UN for its failure to condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. The US vetoed a resolution in October that would have included a condemnation because it didn’t also underline Israel’s right to self-defense.
Hamas said in a statement that the UN resolution should have demanded an immediate halt to Israel’s offensive, and it blamed the United States for pushing “to empty the resolution of its essence” before Friday’s Security Council vote.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, reiterated his longstanding call for a humanitarian cease-fire.
Guterres said nothing can justify Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, its taking of hostages, its rocket launches against Israel and what he called its use of civilians as human shields.
“But at the same time, these violations of international humanitarian law can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people, and they do not free Israel from its own legal obligations under international law,” the secretary-general said.
Israel, shielded by the United States, has resisted international pressure to scale back its offensive. The military has said that months of fighting lie ahead in southern Gaza, an area packed with the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, many of whom were ordered to flee combat in the north earlier in the war.
Evacuation orders have pushed displaced civilians into ever-smaller areas of the south as troops focus on Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city.
The military said late Thursday that it is sending more ground forces, including combat engineers, to Khan Younis to target Hamas militants above ground and in tunnels.
On Friday, it ordered tens of thousands of residents to leave their homes in Burej, an urban refugee camp, and surrounding communities in central Gaza, suggesting a ground assault there could be next.
In the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, an airstrike on a house killed six people, according to Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies at a hospital. Among the dead were a married couple and their 4-month-old child, said the infant’s grandfather, Anwar Dhair.
Rafah is one of the few places in Gaza not under evacuation orders, but it has been targeted in Israeli strikes almost every day.
The air and ground campaign continued in the north, where Israel says it is in the final stages of clearing out Hamas militants.
Mustafa Abu Taha, a Palestinian farm worker, said many areas of his hard-hit Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah have become inaccessible because of massive destruction from airstrikes.
“They are hitting anything moving,” he said of Israeli forces.
RISING DEATH TOLL AND HUNGER
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Friday that it has documented 20,057 deaths in the fighting and more than 50,000 wounded. It does not differentiate between combatant and civilian deaths. It has previously said that roughly two-thirds of the dead were women or minors.
Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, citing the group’s use of crowded residential areas for military purposes and its tunnels under urban areas.
Israel’s military says 139 of its soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive. It says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, including about 2,000 in the past three weeks, but it has not presented any evidence to back up the claim.
For most of the war, Israel also stopped entry of food, water, fuel and other supplies except for truck convoys of aid from Egypt, which cover only a fraction of the needs in Gaza.
Because of insufficient aid entering Gaza, the extent of starvation has eclipsed the near-famines of recent years in Afghanistan and Yemen, and the risk of famine increases each day, Thursday’s UN report said.
An Israeli military liaison officer said there is no food shortage in Gaza, saying sufficient aid is getting through.
“The reserves in Gaza Strip are sufficient for the near-term,” Col. Moshe Tetro said from the Kerem Shalom cargo crossing, without elaborating.
Israel opened the Kerem Shalom crossing several days ago amid international demands to increase the flow of aid. But the military struck the Palestinian side of the crossing Thursday, killing four staffers, and the UN said it was unable to pick up aid there for delivery. It was not immediately known if the UN resumed work there Friday. The Israeli military said it was targeting militants.
The Israel-Hamas war has also pushed Gaza’s health sector into collapse.
Only nine of its 36 health facilities are still partially functioning, all located in the south, according to the World Health Organization.
The agency reported soaring rates of diseases in Gaza, including a five-fold rise in diarrhea and increases in cases of meningitis, skin rashes and scabies.

 

Topics: Israel Hamas Gaza War on Gaza

US, UN urge Libyan leaders to make ‘pragmatic compromises’ and unite amid escalating crises

Updated 5 sec ago
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US, UN urge Libyan leaders to make ‘pragmatic compromises’ and unite amid escalating crises

  • Worsening economic conditions and a fractured judiciary increasingly threaten stability of country split between 2 rival governments, UN Security Council told
  • Washington and the UN continue to work with both authorities on unification efforts to pave the way for national elections but there has been ‘no meaningful progress’
Updated 5 sec ago
Ephrem Kossaify

NEW YORK CITY: The US and the UN on Wednesday called on rival political factions in Libya to overcome deepening divisions and accelerate their efforts to organize national elections, warning that worsening economic conditions and a fractured judiciary threaten the country’s stability.
Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the latest developments in the North African country, Massad Boulos, the senior US adviser for Africa and Middle Eastern Affairs, said Washington would step up its diplomatic efforts in support of UN-led initiatives designed to help unify Libyan institutions and pave the way for a democratically elected government.
“Unification is the key to Libya’s stability and prosperity,” he said as he urged the nation’s leaders to reach “pragmatic compromises” on security and economic integration.
Libya has been engulfed in political turmoil and national divisions since the 2011 Arab Spring protests that led to the overthrow and killing of Muammar Qaddafi. It is split between two rival governments, in the east and the west of the country, each of which is backed by armed militias and international patrons.
The US is working with senior officials from both eastern and western Libya to advance military and economic coordination, Boulos said.
In April, US Africa Command will conduct part of its annual “Flintlock” special operations military exercise in the coastal city of Sirte. Forces from both of the Libyan administrations will train together, a development Boulos hailed as a milestone on the path toward military unification.
On the economic front, he welcomed an agreement for a unified development program, signed in November, that empowers the National Oil Corporation and the Central Bank of Libya, and called for it to be fully implemented alongside the adoption of a unified national budget.
The UN’s special representative for Libya, Hanna S. Tetteh, told the Security Council that despite ongoing UN-facilitated talks under a political road map, there had been “no meaningful
progress” between the eastern-based House of Representatives and the Tripoli-based High Council of State regarding key steps required to organize national elections.
The two governments failed to implement an agreement on the selection of the board of the High National Elections Commission, she said, and instead had taken unilateral actions that complicate the process and risk undermining the commission’s unity.
Tetteh has proposed that a small group be formed to resolve the most critical electoral milestones. If that fails, a broader political convening might be necessary, she added.
Six months after she estimated that progress could be achieved within two months if there were sufficient political will, “the facts speak for themselves,” she said.
Libya’s once largely unified judicial system is now increasingly divided, she warned, with the parallel constitutional bodies that operate in Tripoli and Benghazi issuing conflicting rulings. The rival courts have annulled each other’s decisions in recent weeks, including legislation governing past parliamentary mandates and the appointment of senior judicial officials.
“If actions are not taken to preserve the unity, coherence and independence of the judiciary, the conflicting legal systems that emerge will impact the economy, elections, governance, security and human rights,” Tetteh said, describing this as a “red line” for Libyan unity.
She urged the Security Council to ensure individuals who take actions that undermine the unity of the judicial system are held accountable.
The economic outlook is also deteriorating, Tetteh said, citing devaluation of the national currency, rising prices, fuel shortages and growing public discontent.
On Jan. 18, the Central Bank of Libya devalued the dinar by about 14.7 percent, the second such decision in nine months, in an effort to ease foreign currency pressures. The move eroded household purchasing power, particularly among vulnerable groups.
Nearly 80 percent of public expenditure in Libya is devoted to salaries and subsidies, leaving little room for spending on development, Tetteh said. Fragmented institutions and lack of coordination on spending have contributed to foreign currency imbalances and pressure on reserves.
She also highlighted the problems of persistent corruption and smuggling networks that drain state resources. Investigations by the attorney general’s office found that a “fuel-for-crude” barter mechanism that ended in 2025 had cost the state an estimated $1.5 billion annually compared with global market prices.
According to UN agencies, about 30 percent of Libyans live in poverty, and food prices have risen sharply over the past year.
Transnational criminal networks continue to exploit the fragmented security landscape, Tetteh said, citing a report published in January by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime that identified the country as a major transit hub for drug trafficking, often linked to weapons and human smuggling.
A joint report issued this week by the UN’s Human Rights Office and its mission in Libya documented abuses targeting migrants and asylum seekers, including the discovery of 21 bodies in a mass grave in Ajdabiya, and the release of more than 400 migrants from trafficking sites in eastern Libya.
Tetteh called on Libyan authorities to take action, with international support, to dismantle trafficking networks and ensure accountability.

Topics: US UN Libya Massad Boulos

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