Roving Periscope: As OIC meet fails, and Israel digs deeper in Gaza, aid falters

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: With the near-collapse of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting on the Gaza situation this week, Israel penetrated deeper into the war-torn Strip while international aid to the Palestinian enclave was halted because of the breakdown of communications for the second day on Friday, threatening the survival of 2.3 million poor people trapped there.

With only a few trucks entering Gaza and no fuel to distribute the food, there is no way to meet the current hunger needs as supplies dwindled perilously, the media reported.

Communications systems in the Gaza Strip were down for a second day on Friday with no fuel to power the internet and telephone networks, causing aid agencies to halt cross-border deliveries of humanitarian supplies even as they warned people may soon face starvation.

The six-week-old war was triggered by Hamas’ October 7 attack in southern Israel, in which terrorists killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured some 240 men, women and children.

Gaza is now receiving only 10 percent of its needed food supplies daily, and dehydration and malnutrition are growing with nearly all of the 2.3 million people in the territory needing food, according to Abeer Etefa, a Mideast regional spokeswoman for the United Nations’ World Food Program. People are facing the immediate possibility of starvation, she said from Cairo.

The breakdown of the communications network, which is crucial for coordinating aid deliveries, meant a further worsening of the situation. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said no aid deliveries would be able to enter southern Gaza from Egypt on Friday.

“We have seen fuel and food and water and humanitarian assistance being used as a weapon of war,” said agency spokeswoman Juliette Touma.

Fuel is needed for generators that run emergency communication systems, hospitals, desalination plants, and other critical infrastructure in Gaza.

Israel has barred fuel shipments into Gaza since the beginning of the war but permitted a limited shipment to UNRWA earlier this week for trucks delivering food after the agency’s fuel reservoir ran dry. Touma said that humanitarian agencies are reduced to begging for fuel.

Four hostages taken in the initial Hamas attack have now been confirmed dead, while four others have been freed and one rescued.

More than 11,470 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The official count does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

 Israel’s troops stormed into Al-Shifa on Wednesday, and have been searching the complex. The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the troops searched underground levels of the hospital Thursday and detained technicians who run its equipment.

Meanwhile, Israel pushed deeper into Gaza City, and its troops have been searching Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, for traces of a Hamas command center the military claims was located under the building, displaying images of a tunnel entrance and weapons found in a truck inside the compound. Hamas and Shifa staff denied these claims.

On Thursday, the military released a video of a hole in the hospital courtyard it said was a tunnel entrance. It also showed several assault rifles and RPGs, grenades, ammunition clips, and utility vests laid out on a blanket that it said were found in a pickup truck in the courtyard.

For years, Israel has depicted the hospital as the site of a major Hamas headquarters. In recent weeks, it released satellite maps that specified particular buildings as a command center or as housing underground complexes. It released a computer animation portraying a subterranean network of passageways and rooms filled with weapons and fuel barrels. The U.S. has said it has intelligence to support Israeli claims.

The allegations are part of Israel’s broader accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields across the Gaza Strip, which Israeli officials say is the reason for the large numbers of civilian casualties during weeks of bombardment.

Israeli forces dropped leaflets Wednesday afternoon telling Palestinians in areas east of the southern town of Khan Younis to evacuate. Similar leaflets were dropped over northern Gaza for weeks ahead of the ground invasion.

Most of Gaza’s population is crowded into southern Gaza, including hundreds of thousands who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate to the north to get out of the way of its ground offensive. Some 1.5 million people driven from their homes have packed into U.N. shelters or houses with other families.

The heads of 18 UN agencies and international charities on Thursday rejected the safe zone Israel proposed for the Palestinian refugees, saying that concentrating civilians in one area while hostilities continue was too dangerous. They called for a cease-fire and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza’s population.