‘No safe zones’ in Gaza as Israel intensifies bombings

Since the onset of Israelis' genocidal war on Gaza nearly two months ago, occupation forces have been pounding Gaza, carrying out nonstop attacks from air, sea and land on the people trapped in the region, mass-killing the helpless civilians holed up there.

United Nations officials warned on Tuesday about the rapidly deteriorating situation.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Gaza told reporters that the Israeli regime forces bombings had intensified in the south of the Palestinian enclave around the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah.

“The situation is getting worse by the hour,” Richard Peeperkorn reported talking to the media via video link. “There’s intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern areas, Khan Younis and even in Rafah.”

He said the humanitarian aid reaching Gaza was “way too little” and said the WHO was deeply concerned about the vulnerability of the Palestinian people in the densely populated enclave as more Gazans move further south to escape the bombings. “I want to make this point very clear that we are looking at an increasing humanitarian disaster.”

The WHO representative said WHO had complied with an Israeli order to remove supplies from warehouses in Khan Younis. Peeperkorn said WHO had been told the area would “most likely become an area of active combat in the coming days.”

“We want to make sure that we can actually deliver essential medical supplies,” Peeperkorn added.

On Monday, WHO’s chief, Tedros Ghebreyesus, had asked the Israelis to reconsider the warehouses’ evacuation order; however, the Zionists rejected it.

James Elder, spokesman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, said there was nowhere across Gaza for the civilians to seek refuge.

It is impossible to create a so-called safe zone for civilians to flee to inside the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s bombing campaign, he insisted.

Israel had initially focused its attacks on the north of Gaza, but the Israeli regime forces now also dropped leaflets on parts of the south, telling Palestinian civilians there to flee to other parts.

“The so-called safe zones... are not scientific, they are not rational, they are not possible, and I think the authorities are aware of this,” the UNICEF spokesman told reporters in Geneva via video link from Cairo.

Elder insisted that the pretense that there is somewhere safe for civilians to seek refuge is “callous.”

He stressed that in a real safe zone, “you can guarantee the conditions of food, water, medicine and shelter.”

Elder, who spent the past week or so in Gaza, revealed that none of that is assured in the areas designated as safe zones.

“These are entirely, entirely absent. You cannot overstate this. These are tiny patches of barren land, or they are street corners, they are sidewalks,” he said.

“There is no water, no facilities, no shelter from the cold and the rain (and) there’s no sanitation.”

Elder pointed out that in the overcrowded shelters that most of the displaced in Gaza have flocked to there had been around one toilet for every 400 people.

“Now remove those people and put them in... the so-called safe places. It’s tens of thousands of people without a single toilet — not one — no clean water, nothing to drink,” he said. “Without water, without sanitation, without shelter the so-called safe zones risk becoming zones of disease.”

In the meantime, the Israeli regime has continued its deadly attacks across the besieged Gaza, vowing to eradicate the Palestinian resistance movement there after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupant entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people and decades of inhumane brutalities and land-grabbing policy.

Since the start of its genocide of Gazans, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 15,899 Palestinians, injured 42,000 others, and left vast swathes of residential areas in ruins with thousands of missing and unaccounted martyrs buried under.

It has also imposed a “complete siege” on the brave Palestinians with nowhere to flee to, cutting off their fuel, electricity, food, and water, leaving them at risk of being killed in airstrikes, starving, or catching disease in the death zones assigned by the Israeli regime forces across the land.