Tel Aviv — President Biden issued some of his harshest criticism to date on Tuesday of Israel’s conduct in its war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas. With health officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip saying more than 18,000 people have been killed, Mr. Biden warned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was losing international support due to “indiscriminate bombing” in the densely populated region.
Those comments put Mr. Biden at odds with Netanyahu, who has shown no willingness to ease the bombing campaign in southern Gaza despite catastrophic losses of civilian life and uncertainty over the fate of more than 100 hostages who are still believed to be held in the territory.
Israel’s military says Hamas militants, in their bloody Oct. 7 terror rampage across southern Israel, killed some 1,200 people and abducted more than 200, roughly half of whom have since been released, most of them during a week-long cease-fire.
Mr. Biden has faced mounting criticism for his administration’s response to the war, including his refusal to call for a new cease-fire. The White House and Netanyahu have argued that any new truce would allow Hamas militants to regroup.
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So, the war continues apace, and in southern Gaza, it was another night of blood-soaked casualties from Israeli airstrikes streaming into packed hospitals that are quickly running out of supplies.
For the second consecutive night, a missile struck just a few hundred yards from CBS News producer Marwan al-Ghoul in southern Gaza, an area where Israel’s military says there are “safe zones.”
“It’s a dangerous narrative. They are, quite simply, not safe,” said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations’ children’s aid agency UNICEF, who just left Gaza.
“It’s a nightmare,” he told CBS News. “They are under attack from the air and very much now from the threat of disease.”
The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that Hamas uses the humanitarian zones to launch rockets and since Oct. 18, when the zones were established, 116 rockets have been fired toward Israel. The statement said that 38 of these rockets fell inside the Gaza Strip.
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Israel has been urging Gazan civilians to seek shelter along the undeveloped southwest coast of Gaza, in a designated “humanitarian area” about the size of Los Angeles International Airport called al-Mawasi. It now holds several hundred thousand desperate people. Asked by CBS News if the humanitarian area is, in fact, humane, Elder didn’t hesitate:
“No,” he said. “A safe zone requires two things: One, not to be bombed… The second one… it must have living essentials, water, sanitation, food, protection.”
“We suffered from the war of cannons, and escaped it to arrive at the war of starvation,” Ibrahim Mahram, among those who fled to al-Mawasi, told the Reuters news agency. He said there were five families crammed into a single tent.
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The Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza said Wednesday that disease was spreading due to a lack of clean water, and that the few health facilities still functioning in the region had run completely out of children’s vaccines.
Warning of “catastrophic health repercussions,” the ministry called on the international community to provide new supplies of vaccines, “to prevent disaster.”
The head of the U.N.’s World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, warned over the weekend that that “Gaza’s health system is on its knees and collapsing,” with only 14 of the territory’s 36 hospitals still functioning at all, and supplies dwindling fast. He said the risks were likely to worsen, “with the deteriorating situation and approaching winter conditions.”
Along with several other Israeli human rights groups, the B’tselem organization said it had sent a letter to President Biden on Tuesday asking that he use his leverage as leader of Israel’s most vital ally to “change Israel’s policy and prevent deterioration of the already catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.”
