Israel bombed southern Gaza on Saturday as the UN warned that the besieged Palestinian territory has been rendered \u201cuninhabitable\u201d by three months of war. Top Western diplomats were in the region as part of a fresh push to boost the flow of aid into Gaza and address mounting fears of a wider conflict. The Egyptian Red Cr\u00ade\u00adscent on Friday said 1,200 water purifiers, 100 oxygen cylinders, one oxygen generator, 1,000 solar-powered items, 24 power generators and 418 medical supplies had been blocked by Israel from reaching Gaza since the conflict started. The fighting, triggered by the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas, has sent tensions soaring across the region, and shows no signs of abating with the conflict entering its fourth month. Civilians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have borne the brunt of the violence as the scale of the destruction has triggered mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis. With swathes of the territory already redu\u00adc\u00aded to rubble, UN huma\u00adnitarian chief Martin Griffiths said \u201cGaza has simply become uninhabitable\u201d. The UN official said famine was \u201caround the corner\u201d as people in Gaza faced the \u201chighest levels of food insecurity ever recorded\u201d. Gaza had become \u201ca place of death and despair\u201d, said Griffiths. \u201cHope has never been more elusive.\u201d A public health disaster is unfolding as infectious diseases spread in overcrowded shelters, Griffiths said. Around 180 Palestin\u00adian women \u201care giving birth daily amidst this chaos\u201d, Griffiths said in a statement issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes on the southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting. On Israel\u2019s northern border, Lebanon\u2019s Hez\u00adbol\u00adlah group said it lau\u00adnched its \u201cinitial respo\u00adnse\u201d to the killing of Hamas\u2019s deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri in Beirut. A US defence official has told AFP that Israel carried out the strike, which Israel has not claimed. Hezbollah said it had targeted the Israeli military\u2019s Meron air control base with 62 missiles, while the Israeli army reported \u201capproximately 40 launches from Leba\u00adnon\u201d early on Saturday, and said it struck Hezbollah \u201cmilitary sites\u201d in response. A military spokesperson confirmed the mountaintop base had been targeted but did not say whether it was damaged. No casualties were reported in Israel. Lebanon\u2019s Jama\u2019a Islamiya Islamist group said it had also fired two volleys of rockets at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, in the third operation claimed by the militant Sunni group since Oct. 7. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, on a visit to Beirut, warned against a wider war. \u201cIt is imperative to avoid regional escalation in the Middle East. It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,\u201d he said. Before heading to Saudi Arabia, Borrell called for a redoubling of peace efforts. \u201cIsrael has declared a goal to eradicate Hamas. There must be another way to eradicate Hamas that doesn\u2019t\u2026 create so many people getting killed,\u201d he said. In the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, men clambered carefully around the concrete ruins and twisted rebar where Mohammad al-Attar\u2019s house stood before rockets that he blamed on Israel destroyed it. \u201cThere was no prior warning or anything,\u201d Attar said, his hands sta\u00adined grey from the debris. \u201cThere\u2019s still the corpse of a little girl\u201d underneath. A spokesperson for the Israeli military claimed that \u201cwe have completed dismantling Hamas\u2019s \u2018military framework\u2019 in northern Gaza and killed around 8,000 of its fighters in that area. The Israeli forces have also seized tens of thousands of weapons in Gaza\u2019s north and millions of documents, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in an online briefing. \u201cWe are now focused on dismantling Hamas in the centre and south of the Gaza Strip.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Israel bombed southern Gaza on Saturday as the UN warned that the besieged Palestinian territory has been rendered \u201cuninhabitable\u201d by three months of war. Top…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12866,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}