“Nine months after the announcement of a ceasefire, still, nowhere is safe for Palestinians in Gaza,” UN rights office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters in Geneva. [Getty]
The United Nations condemned on Tuesday daily and deadly Israeli military attacks on Gaza that it said had killed at least 57 Palestinians, including six children, in the past week alone.
A so-called “ceasefire” agreed in October remains in place between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas, but it has not halted Israeli attacks on Gaza.
“Nine months after the announcement of a ceasefire, still, nowhere is safe for Palestinians in Gaza,” UN rights office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters in Geneva.
He decried that “the Israeli military has intensified its attacks in Gaza in recent days, killing and injuring dozens of Palestinians”.
The Israeli attacks had killed “at least 57 Palestinians, including six children and eight women” from 13 to 20 July, Kheetan said.
Kheetan said the Israeli strikes had targeted residential buildings, at least one tent sheltering internally displaced people, and other crowded areas, with 34 of the victims “killed far away from the Israeli-imposed yellow line”.
War crimes
In attacks on 17-18 July, for instance, he said the UN rights office had determined that 10 Israeli attacks in Gaza City, middle Gaza, north Gaza and Khan Younes had killed at least 21 Palestinians.
“In one of these attacks, on an apartment in Gaza City, five members of one family, were killed together: both parents and three siblings, reportedly aged eight, 15, and 17,” he said.
Kheetan stressed that “the killing of civilians in these attacks raises concerns of continuing violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes in Gaza”.
“Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians is a war crime,” he stressed.
The spokesman also warned that Israel’s constant moving of its self-proclaimed “yellow line” westwards had left the Palestinian population in Gaza “trapped in an ever-shrinking area”.
This, he stressed, presents “a continuous threat to life as the Israeli military appears to routinely fire on Palestinians for mere presence in the vicinity of that line, in violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”.
More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the so-called truce took effect last October.
