Gaza communications blackout ends, hope rises for critical aid deliveries

Internet and telephone services were partially restored in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, ending a telecommunications outage that forced the United Nations to halt critical humanitarian aid deliveries because it could not coordinate its convoys.

Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building on the outskirts of the town of Khan Younis, killing at least 26 Palestinians, a doctor at the hospital where the bodies were taken said.

Early in the war, the Israeli army told civilians to flee northern Gaza, the target of the ground offensive, but it also continued its bombing in the southern evacuation zone where Khan Younis is located.

Israel has signaled plans to expand its offensive south while continuing operations in the north, including Gaza City, where troops continued to search the area’s largest hospital, Shifa, for signs of a Hamas command center which, according to Israel, was under the building. and the hospital staff denies it.

In Khan Younis, the attack early Saturday hit Hamad City, a middle-class housing project built in recent years with financing from Qatar. In addition to the 26 deaths, another 20 were injured, Dr. Nehad Taeima said at Nasser Hospital.

Israel rarely comments on individual attacks, saying only that it is targeting Hamas and trying to prevent harm to civilians. In many of the Israeli attacks, women and children were among the dead.

The war, now in its seventh week, was sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped some 240 men, women and children.

According to Palestinian health authorities, more than 11,400 Palestinians have been killed in the war, two-thirds of them women and minors. Another 2,700 have been reported missing, believed to be buried under the rubble. The count does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.

The UN has warned that Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are facing serious shortages of food and water, but it was not immediately clear when the Palestinian refugee agency known as UNRWA would resume aid deliveries, which were suspended on Friday. can resume. .

The Palestinian telecommunications provider said it was able to restart its generators after UNRWA donated fuel. The end of the communications blackout marked a return to news and posts from journalists and activists in the besieged enclave on social media platforms as service began returning late Friday evening.

Israel has banned access to fuel since the start of the war, saying Hamas would divert it for military purposes. It has also blocked food, water and other supplies, except for a trickle of aid from Egypt, which aid workers say falls far short of what is needed.

Going forward, Israel said it would allow 10,000 liters (2,641 gallons) of fuel daily for the continuation of communications service, the US State Department said. In addition, Israel agreed on Friday following a US request to allow a very minimal amount of fuel to enter Gaza each day for humanitarian purposes, Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said. COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian affairs, said this would amount to 60,000 liters (15,850 gallons) per day for the UN.

Yet that is only 37 percent of the fuel UNRWA needs to support its humanitarian operations, including food distribution and the operation of generators in hospitals and water and sanitation facilities, the UN said.

According to the UN, Gaza has received only 10 percent of its needed food supplies per day in the form of shipments from Egypt, and the closure of the water system has caused most of the population to drink contaminated water, causing an outbreak of disease.

According to the UN World Food Program, dehydration and malnutrition are on the rise, with almost all residents in need of food.

Thousands of protesters, including families of more than 50 hostages, began the fourth leg of a five-day walk from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Friday, chanting: Bring them home! They marched to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to call on his war cabinet to do more to save their loved ones. They have urged the government to consider a ceasefire or a prisoner swap in exchange for the hostages.

Hamas offered to exchange all hostages for about 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which the cabinet rejected.

Hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia told Al Jazeera television that Israeli forces should either bring them fuel for electricity equipment or allow an evacuation.

The hospital has become a giant prison, he said. We are surrounded by death.

The Israeli army said it had delivered 4,000 liters of water and 1,500 ready-made meals to Shifa, but staff said this was too little for the number of people there.

Israeli military spokesman Col. Richard Hecht acknowledged that the troops’ search for traces of Hamas was slow. It will take time, he said.

Israel is under pressure to prove its claim that Hamas has set up its main command center in and under the hospital. So far, Israel has shown photos and videos of weapons caches it says were found there, as well as what it says was a tunnel entrance. The AP could not independently verify the Israeli claims.

The allegations are part of Israel’s broader accusation that Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields in the Gaza Strip, claiming this is the reason for the high numbers of civilian casualties during weeks of bombing.

Most of the area’s population is now sheltering in the south, including hundreds of thousands of people who have heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate Gaza City and the north to get out of the way of the ground offensive.

In addition to Friday and Saturday’s attacks in the Khan Younis area, another 41 people were killed Friday in an attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp that turned a building into rubble, staff at a nearby hospital said.