Third US, Israeli aid centre to begin operating today: Israeli Army Radio
The third US and Israel-backed aid centre will open today in central Gaza, south of the Netzarim Corridor, Israel’s Army Radio has reported. The new distribution centre, like the two that have already opened, will be able to provide food and humanitarian aid to 300,000 Palestinians every week, the army-operated station stated.
The location of the new centre is intended to push people from Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip to evacuate south, it added.
“The mission is to break the barrier of fear. We are already recognising the beginning of Hamas’s deterioration and loss of control over the population,” security officials were quoted as saying by the station.
The aid centres, run by an organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, have faced international criticism, including from the UN and humanitarian groups. At least 10 Palestinians desperately seeking aid from the organisation have been killed by Israeli forces in the past three days.
300,000 every week, that's only 43 thousand a day. It was never intended to help the entire population anyway. Even fully scaled up it can barely provide enough to keep half of the population on minimal life support.
And Israel is not even trying to hide the fact they're using aid for ethic cleansing.
Limited humanitarian aid a ‘strategy’ to distract from ongoing violence: Doctor
Emergency physician James Smith, who spent several weeks working in Gaza since Israel launched its war, has criticised the Israeli-led and US-backed mechanism that began distributing some aid in Gaza this week.
“This is a strategy to distract from ongoing violence and ongoing ethnic cleansing,” the British doctor told Al Jazeera. “This strategy has long been used, it has a name, it’s called the ‘humanitarian alibi’, whereby so-called humanitarian provision distracts from the acts perpetrated by genociders and other belligerents.”
Smith said the distribution of dry food posed a question of how Palestinians would be able to find water to cook it with. The distribution of much-needed medicine has also not been addressed.
Such conditions leave medics largely unable to respond to emergencies. “I’ve worked with medics who had spent the previous day and night looking for food for themselves and their family, living in tents, being subjected to the same conditions as everyone else,” Smith said. “Everyone is collectively traumatised by Israel’s violence in Gaza.”
Almost 700 attacks on medical facilities and personnel have been documented, but Smith said the figure was likely to be “a gross underestimation”.
Israel’s mass displacement campaign is ‘erasing’ Gaza: Oxfam
Global advocacy group Oxfam International has accused Israel of “erasing Gaza itself” through its relentless military campaign and mass displacement orders, and called on world powers to apply real pressure on Israel to lift the siege.
The UK-based charity said Israel’s military offensive and use of displacement orders have squeezed civilians into five zones that make up less than 20 percent of Gaza’s territory.
Along with its blockade of supplies into the territory, it appeared that Israel’s strategy was not about targeting fighters, but “a deliberate campaign to dismantle and depopulate Gaza”, the group said in a statement, adding that the process of forced displacement was a war crime.
“For over 600 days, Israel has been saying it’s targeting Hamas, but it is civilians who have been corralled, bombed and killed en masse every day,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy lead in the occupied Palestinian territory.
She said the displacement orders followed a “clear and calculated pattern: using the threat of violence to herd civilians into ever-shrinking zones of confinement”.
Oxfam described the areas where Palestinians are being driven as dust-choked encampments that offered no real protection, and were often hit by Israeli strikes. Meanwhile, Israel had expanded its military presence along five “security corridors” which cut across Gaza, slicing the territory into zones.
“This isn’t counterterrorism, as Israel alleges – it’s the systematic clearing of Gaza through militarized force into enclaves of internment.”
