Israel’s attacks have increased throughout the Gaza Strip, especially in the vicinity of hospitals and in the southern part of the besieged territory, where ground operations are stepping up.
According to the latest casualty figures released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 16,510 Palestinians have been martyred in Gaza and the West Bank, including at least 7,112 children.
Additionally, at least 46,981 Palestinians have been injured, Al Jazeera reported.
The Palestinians living at the southern tip of Gaza are making do with plastic sheets rigged up as tents, branches gathered from everywhere to make fires.
Thousands of Palestinians are fleeing Khan Yunis, Gaza’s main southern city, now surrounded by the Israeli army towards Rafah, less than 10 kilometres (six miles) away on the territory’s closed border with Egypt.
Many among them had already been displaced once in recent weeks, heading south to escape heavy fighting between Israel and Hamas in the north.
“We arrived here with no shelter and got rained on last night. There isn’t anything to eat — no bread, no flour,” Ghassan Bakr told reporters.
The grocery stores in Rafah, like elsewhere in Gaza, are empty. At the market, the farmers who can still cultivate their land sell tomatoes, onions, cabbages and other vegetables.
On a sidewalk, children throw themselves at a large pot of semolina prepared by a charity, scraping at the bottom with bowls and plastic containers.
The head of the UN has warned that he expects “public order to completely break down soon due to the desperate conditions” in Gaza, currently under relentless Israeli bombardment.
The humanitarian conditions amid the Israel-Hamas war are “fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a letter to the president of the Security Council.
Guterres also warned that the war in the Gaza Strip threatened to “aggravate existing threats to international peace and security”.
