Gaza Strip - Israel faced mounting international pressure Monday over the rising civilian death toll and destruction of hospitals in Gaza, as it pressed on with its attacks against Hamas.
The United Nations Security Council was set to vote Monday on a new resolution calling for an "urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities" in Gaza.
According to the health ministry in Gaza more than 18,800 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel's campaign in Gaza.
It said dozens were killed in Israeli strikes on Sunday. Following months of fierce bombardment and fighting, most of Gaza's population has also been displaced and people are grappling with shortages of fuel, food, water, and medicine.
Fewer than one-third of Gaza's hospitals are partly functioning, according to the UN, with the World Health Organization denouncing on Sunday the impact of Israeli operations on two hospitals in the north of the territory. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency was "appalled by the effective destruction" of the Kamal Adwan hospital, where Israeli forces carried out a multi-day operation against Hamas. Outside the hospital courtyard, which showed tank and bulldozer tracks, Abu Mohammed, who came to look for his son, stood crying.
"I don't know how I will find him," he said, pointing to the debris. The Israeli army pulled out of the hospital on Sunday after an operation lasting several days, claiming it had been used as a command and control centre by Hamas. Israel said that before entering the hospital it had negotiated safe passage for the evacuation of most of the people inside.
The WHO also said the Israeli bombing had reduced the emergency department at the Al-Shifa hospital to "a bloodbath". The Hamas-run health ministry said an Israeli strike on Sunday hit Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza's main city of Khan Yunis, killing one person and injuring seven others.
Humanitarian aid began to dribble into the besieged Gaza Strip through a second border crossing Sunday morning, the United Nations said, as growing numbers of the enclave’s residents faced ceaseless hunger and cold, and aid groups warned of widespread disease.
Israel’s agency overseeing policy, COGAT, posted on social media that 79 humanitarian aid trucks had been inspected Sunday and allowed through the crossing at Kerem Shalom, which the United States had pressured Israel to open.
humanitarian officials have warned for weeks that the amount of aid entering Gaza through the only other open crossing — at the city of Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt — was far too little to address the needs of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people.
Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for the U.N. agency that provides services to Palestinians in Gaza, said in an interview that Israel had agreed to allow in up to 200 trucks a day through Kerem Shalom, in addition to the aid entering at Rafah.
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