Meanwhile, a United Nations-backed assessment says 300,000 people in the northern part of the territory face famine.
Palestinian territories:
Tensions rose on Tuesday as Hamas leaders accused Israel of undermining Gaza truce talks after a second attack on the devastated Palestinian territory’s largest hospital.
Months of war have pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the besieged area to the brink of famine, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said everyone in Gaza now needs humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile, a United Nations-backed assessment says 300,000 people in the territory’s north will face famine in May without significant aid.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Israel was blocking aid and fighting the conflict in a way that “could amount to starvation as a tactic of war.”
Israeli forces launched an attack on Gaza’s largest hospital on Tuesday, which they claimed was being used for military purposes. They said more than 50 militants were killed and about 300 suspects were arrested and questioned.
In response, Hamas leader in Qatar Ismail Haniyeh accused Israel of seeking to “create chaos and perpetuate violence” and “undermine ongoing negotiations in Doha.”
“The actions of the Zionist occupying forces at the Shifa Medical Center confirm their intention to hinder the recovery of life in Gaza and undermine fundamental aspects of human existence,” Haniyeh said.
It comes after Qatar resumed ceasefire talks after weeks of talks failed to secure a truce for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last week.
Israeli spy chief David Bania launched a new round of talks with Egyptian and Qatari mediators on Monday.
Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majid Ansari said he was “cautiously optimistic” but “it is too early to declare any success.”
Ansari said they expected to submit a counter-proposal to Hamas after both sides rejected previous proposals, adding that technical talks would continue.
-“Screaming in fear”-
According to an AFP tally of official Israeli data, Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7 that killed about 1,160 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and the bloodiest Gaza war in history broke out.
The militants also held about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza and 33 of them are presumed dead.
Israel’s relentless offensive against Hamas has killed at least 31,819 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Blinken, who will travel to Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to try to bolster support for a temporary truce and increased aid, stressed that everyone in Gaza is now suffering “severe acute food insecurity.”
“This is the first time an entire population has been classified in this way,” he said during a visit to the Philippines.
AFP footage showed desperate crowds gathering at the Jabaliya refugee camp for carrot soup, underscoring his point.
“We came to queue but they kicked us out,” said Musab al-Masri, a resident of Jabaliya, lamenting that there was not enough food for everyone.
Further south, a diplomatic storm continues to engulf the city of Rafah, as hundreds of thousands of people seek refuge from fighting elsewhere in the region.
US President Joe Biden is putting pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw from a threatened all-out ground operation.
But Netanyahu said he told Biden “we are determined to completely eliminate these battalions in Rafah, and we cannot do that without a ground invasion”.
The city has been bombed, and AFP footage showed residents rummaging through the rubble of buildings on Tuesday after another night of strikes.
Heavy downpours overnight intensified misery in the disaster area, leaving many displaced people with nowhere to escape but makeshift tents.
Umm Abdullah Alwan said her children were “screaming in fear” because “we couldn’t differentiate between the sound of rain and the sound of shelling”.
– Hospital Raid –
Most of Israel’s military operations over the past two months have been concentrated in the south.
Officials announced in January that the Hamas command structure in northern Gaza had been dismantled.
But the attack on Shifa brought attention back to the north.
Israel has long accused militants of using hospitals as bases, and Israeli troops attacked Shifa in November, sparking an international outcry.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said this week that Palestinian militants and commanders had returned to Shifa “and turned it into a command center.”
A military statement late Tuesday said the operation arrested “dozens of known terrorists” from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Witnesses said airstrikes and tank attacks were carried out near the hospital compound, which was packed with thousands of displaced civilians as well as the sick and wounded.
A Palestinian man was killed by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, local officials said, and the Israeli army said a soldier shot and killed a suspect during unrest.
According to the Ramallah Health Ministry, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 430 Palestinians in the West Bank since the Gaza war began.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
