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DUBAI: Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani said on Tuesday that Daesh’s commander for Iraq had been killed in an operation in the Hamrin Mountains in northeast Iraq.
GAZA: The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency called on Tuesday for a temporary truce to allow people to leave areas of northern Gaza as health officials said they were running out of supplies to treat patients hurt in a three-week-old Israeli offensive.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UNRWA relief agency, said the humanitarian situation had reached a dire point, with bodies abandoned by roadsides or buried under rubble.
“In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die,” he said in a statement on social media platform X. “They feel deserted, hopeless and alone.”
“I am calling for an immediate truce, even if for a few hours, to enable safe humanitarian passage for families who wish to leave the area & reach safer places,” he said.
The call came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel looking for ways of reviving attempts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, following the death of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar almost a week ago.
Washington has called on Israel to allow more humanitarian supplies into northern Gaza and Israel says it has allowed scores of aid trucks in as well as facilitating air drops but Palestinian health officials say no aid has reached them and the situation is extremely difficult.
On Tuesday, health officials said more than 20 people had been killed by Israeli forces.
Palestinian health officials and the civil emergency service said dozens of bodies of people killed by Israeli fire were scattered on roads and under rubble. Rescue teams could not reach them because of ongoing strikes, they said.
“Many wounded have died before our eyes and we couldn’t do anything for them,” said Munir Al-Bursh, the director of the Gaza health ministry, who is currently in northern Gaza.
“Hospitals also ran out of coffins to prepare the dead and we have asked people to donate any fabric they have at home,” he said in a statement.
The Israeli military, which launched an offensive against Hamas militants holding out in the nearby town of Jabalia this month, says it is evacuating people along designated routes and has filtered out dozens of militants from civilians going south.
Israeli drones circled overhead calling on Palestinians to evacuate areas around the town of Beit Lahiya, close to the border line where an offensive that started around the nearby area of Jabalia to the south began earlier this month.
Many Palestinians fear the evacuation of northern towns is part of an Israeli plan to clear the area of its population to create a buffer zone that will enable Israel to control Gaza after the war.
The military denies the evacuations are part of any wider plan, saying it is moving people to separate them from Hamas fighters but the wider strategic picture remains unclear since the death of Sinwar removed one of Israel’s main obstacles.
It said troops had dismantled tunnels and other infrastructure in Beit Lahiya and local people said fighting appeared to be confined to hit-and-run attacks by small groups of Hamas militants, “not actual fighting or equal combat,” one Palestinian in the area said via WhatsApp.
The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they have attacked forces with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.
The death toll in Israel’s operation in Gaza is approaching 43,000, according to the latest health ministry figures issued on Tuesday and the enclave lies in ruins, with most of the 2.3 million population displaced, many in makeshift shelters.
The Israeli operation was triggered by the attack by Hamas-led gunmen who rampaged through communities around the Gaza Strip on Oct, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 as hostages into Gaza.
BERLIN: The war in Gaza has devastated the Palestinian economy, which is now 35 percent smaller than it was at the start of Israel’s invasion a year ago, while development levels in Gaza itself have collapsed to the level of the 1950s, the UN’s development agency said.
Launching a new study on the socioeconomic impacts of the war, which Palestinian officials say has claimed more than 42,500 lives, the UNDP’s Chitose Noguchi said that by some measures the region’s poverty level was now approaching 100 percent as a result of the disruption, with unemployment now at 80 percent.
“The state of Palestine is experiencing unprecedented levels of setbacks,” she said over a crackling line from Deir Al-Balah. “For Gaza, reversing development by an estimated 70 years to 1955.”
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Tuesday that at least 42,718 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants.
The toll includes 115 deaths in the previous 48 hours, according to the ministry, which said 100,282 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
GENEVA: The poverty rate across the Palestinian territories will almost double this year to 74.3 percent after months of fighting in Gaza, according to a report by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) released Tuesday.
“The immediate consequence of the war, not just in physical infrastructure destruction, but also in terms of poverty, livelihoods and loss of livelihoods, is enormous,” Achim Steiner, head of the UNDP, said.
The poverty rate had been 38.8 percent at the end of 2023 but another 2.61 million Palestinians fell into poverty this year, bringing the total to 4.1 million.
“It’s quite clear from this socio-economic assessment, that the level of destruction has set back the state of Palestine by years, if not decades, in terms of its development pathway,” Steiner said.
The study estimates that this year unemployment in the Palestinian territories could rise to 49.9 percent and that GDP will be 35.1 percent lower than without the war in Gaza.
He said that even if humanitarian aid is delivered each year, the Palestinian economy will not return to its pre-crisis levels for a decade or more.
Recovery will also require support to rebuild destroyed capital and the lifting of “stifling economic conditions.”
The study says Israel’s bombing campaign created 42 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza, creating major health risks. The destruction of solar panels is particularly dangerous given the lead and other heavy metals they release.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 last year which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s bombing and ground offensives in Gaza have killed 42,603 people, a majority civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN considers reliable.
