Over one billion worth of humanitarian aid was provided to the Palestinian people. This is the most concrete result obtained at the “humanitarian conference” on Gaza held in Paris, France. Most of this aid will meet the UN’s estimated aid needs of $1.2 billion for the people of Gaza and the West Bank by the end of 2023. The event was organized by President Emmanuel Macron to unblock aid to the Strip, which is suffering from Israeli bombings following the Hamas attack on October 7.
“We must work to protect civilians. To achieve this goal, we need a very rapid humanitarian pause and we must work for a ceasefire,” the French president said in a statement before representatives of nearly fifty countries and humanitarian organizations. While Israel has the “right to defend itself and the duty to protect its people,” its government also has a “supreme responsibility to enforce the law and protect civilians.” The tiny Palestinian enclave, home to more than 2 million people, has been under siege since Hamas launched a violent and unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians. Attacks by Israel, which has vowed to “destroy” the Islamist militias, have killed more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health officials. However, while an Israeli military official said that “there is no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip”, he also acknowledged that Palestinian civilians were experiencing “many difficulties”.
At the conference, which was hastily announced last week, it was announced that mostly second-level representatives came together in the absence of the Israeli government. But no promise of aid is meaningless without the possibility of trucks actually entering the Strip, and humanitarian organizations represented at the event denounced the impossibility of delivering aid as long as the bombing of the Strip continues. Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said: “We cannot wait another minute for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and the lifting of the siege that imposes collective punishment on one million children.”
The White House announced that Israel agreed to suspend its operations in the north of Gaza for four hours a day, starting today (Thursday, November 9). Washington national security spokesman John Kirby said the pauses were expected to allow people to escape through two humanitarian corridors and represent an important first step. “The Israelis told us that there will be no military operations in these areas during the pause and that this process will begin today,” Kirby said. Kirby added that the pauses, which will be announced three hours in advance, result from meetings between US and Israeli officials in recent days, including US President Joe Biden’s meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While the conflict continued with all its violence, thousands of Palestinians took shelter in Al Shifah hospital in Gaza city, despite Israel’s instructions to evacuate the surrounded area. They took shelter in tents inside the hospital and say they have nowhere else to go. Ocha, the U.N. humanitarian office, said Israel had once again told northern residents to head south and shelling around the main road continued, endangering displaced people. “We saw the rotting corpses of civilians like us, not military vehicles or insurgents, but people in civilian vehicles,” Khalid Abu Issa said after crossing south to the Gaza Valley with his family.
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Source: Today IT
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
