The war between Israel and Hamas, which began with the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, is bloody.
If the numbers announced by Israel and the Hamas administration are correct, a total of eight thousand civilians have already died in Israel and Gaza.
The figures are imprecise, and the numbers given by Hamas officials in the closed Gaza Strip could not be verified. Israel’s chapter also includes soldiers.
However, more civilians have already died than, for example, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, where there were deaths in the first five weeks Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights according to calculations, more than 4,500 people.
The war is also bloody in the history of Israeli-Palestinian clashes. In the lower graphic you can see the number of deaths of the parties in the violence of the last ten years.
Israel announces that it has accelerated its airstrikes on Gaza, from 320 on Monday to 400 on Tuesday. Between Monday and Tuesday, according to the Hamas health authority, more than 700 people died in the Gaza Strip.
If the ground attack prepared by Israel begins, the number of victims can be predicted to increase drastically.
Gaza hospitals are running out of fuel
Some food, water and medicines have been brought to the civilians from the direction of Egypt. According to the UN, the aid should be increased 20 times to be enough for the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza.
Now the UN is warning that if fuel shipments to Gaza are not started immediately, the generators producing the electricity needed by the hospitals will run out of fuel as early as Wednesday.
Israel says it has killed Hamas terrorists and destroyed the organization’s military targets that have enabled Hamas to fire rockets into Israel even in recent days. Israel has a negative attitude towards fuel transports because it considers them to end up being used by Hamas.
Guterres reminded of humanitarian law
So far, the international community has not been able to intervene in the conflict. The difficulty of the intervention became very clear on Tuesday evening Finnish time at the UN Security Council session.
Secretary General of the UN Antonio Guterres said the parties to the war must abide by international humanitarian law, but the rules are now being broken in Gaza.
– It is also important to note that the attacks by Hamas did not take place in a vacuum. The Palestinians have been under a repressive occupation for 56 years.
Guterres said that the grievances experienced by the Palestinians still do not justify the attacks by Hamas.
– And the horrific attacks do not justify the collective punishment of the Palestinians.
Israel fiercely criticized Guterres’ speech
The Israeli Foreign Minister attended the meeting So Cohen and Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan announced shortly after Guterres’ speech at a press conference that Cohen’s planned meeting with Guterres for the same day has been cancelled.
Erdan also demanded the immediate resignation of the general secretary.
– You, Mr. Secretary General, have lost all morality and impartiality. When you say these despicable attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are condoning terrorism!
The United States is balancing
The US has supported Israel’s right to defeat Hamas terrorists.
– Every nation has the right to defend itself and prevent the recurrence of such horrors. No member of the Security Council or the UN could tolerate the slaughter of its citizens, said the US Secretary of State, who was at the UN meeting Antony Blinken.
At the same time, the United States has tried to make it possible to ease the plight of civilians in the Gaza area.
The United States has hoped for short ceasefires from Israel in order to get aid shipments to the region. Some countries, such as Russia, are demanding a wider ceasefire. Israel has reacted to the first mentioned with a tight fisted attitude.
The United States does not want to appear as the architect of the plight of civilians in the Palestinian territories, also because it is wary of the Arab countries’ reaction. In particular, the United States avoids the spread of the crisis in the direction of Iran, which finances Hamas.
Israel is America’s most important ally in the region, and the United States gives it billions of dollars in military support every year.
This year, they want to more than quadruple the support. Last year, 3.1 billion euros were given in military aid, last week President Joe Biden suggested EUR 13.4 billion in support to be distributed by the end of September next year.
Sources: AFP, AP, Reuters