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.
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.
Meanwhile, Gaza rescuers said a pre-dawn Israeli air strike Friday killed 10 members of the same family, as the UN said dozens of recent attacks on the Palestinian territory had killed only women and children.
A UN rights office report also warned that expanding Israeli evacuation orders were resulting in the "forcible transfer" of people into ever-shrinking spaces, which "raise real concern as to the future viability of Palestinians as a Group in Gaza".
Israel's military said it was looking into the attack that killed members of the same family in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, adding separately that it had struck approximately 40 "terror targets" across the territory over the past day.- AFP/Reuters
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