Palestinian children fill-up on water from a hose in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on April 19, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. - AFP
ISTANBUL (Bernama-Anadolu): A child is killed every 10 minutes in the Gaza Strip, according to an assessment Saturday by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA.
"A deplorable number of children have also been injured amid intense and often indiscriminate attacks,” it wrote on X, according to Anadolu Agency.
"An immediate cease-fire is the last hope remaining,” UNRWA added.
The Palestinian Civil Defense Administration in the Gaza Strip said late Saturday that the bodies of 50 Palestinians killed by the Israeli army were recovered from a mass grave in the southern Khan Younis province.
"Today, our teams in the Khan Younis Governorate uncovered the bodies of 50 martyrs from different age groups who were collected by the occupation forces and buried collectively at Nasser Hospital,” Anadolu reported it said in a statement.
The statement underlined that there are still bodies in mass graves and under the rubble, adding that civil defense teams continue search and recovery efforts.
The Israeli army announced its withdrawal from Khan Younis on April 7 after four months of a ground operation aimed at retrieving Israeli hostages held by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, but it exited the city without achieving its objectives.
The Israeli operation left extensive destruction to roads, homes and infrastructure.
Flouting the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling, Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza where at least 34,049 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 76,901 injured since Oct 7, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The Israeli onslaught has pushed 85 per cent of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60 per cent of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Hostilities have continued unabated and aid deliveries remain woefully insufficient to address the humanitarian catastrophe.
Gaza media office said at least 3,814 humanitarian aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip since the beginning of April, far less than what the US administration claims, Anadolu Agency reported.
"The number of trucks that entered Gaza since the beginning of April until now is 3,814 trucks, an average of 200 trucks per day,” Salama Marouf, the office’s head, said in a statement.
Marouf said "the majority” of the trucks carry "non-essential aid,” and that they are "half of what the US administration talks about.”
"US Secretary of State (Antony Blinken) and (Samantha Power) the Director of the US Agency for International Development claimed that the number of trucks entering Gaza reached 400 trucks per day, and this is not true,” he added.
He added: "President Joe Biden also claimed that Gaza received 3,000 trucks within two weeks, and this is also not true”.
He called on international and human rights groups to "pressure the US administration, the occupation, and all relevant parties to open the Rafah border crossing and open all crossings in Gaza, and to allow the entry of a thousand trucks of aid daily, in order to save the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.” - Bernhama-Anadolu
