MSF, Islamic Relief and Save the Children are among the 22 aid groups issuing a joint call for world leaders to ‘urgently intervene’ to stop Israel’s genocide.
GAZA — The heads of more than 20 aid agencies working in Gaza have called on world leaders to “urgently intervene” in the war, following the first-ever determination by a United Nations commission that Israel is perpetrating genocide in the devastated territory.
With an estimated 65,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks so far in Gaza, including more than 20,000 children, the agencies warned early on Wednesday that almost 1 million more people are now “on the precipice of an even deadlier period in Gaza’s story if action is not taken”.
“The inhumanity of the situation in Gaza is unconscionable,” the groups said in a joint statement, warning that Israel’s latest efforts to forcibly displace Gaza City’s population through a ground occupation are aimed at making the enclave’s largest urban area “deliberately… uninhabitable”.
“As humanitarian leaders, we have borne direct witness to the horrifying deaths and suffering of the people of Gaza. Our warnings have gone unheeded and thousands more lives are still at stake,” the agencies said.
“More than half a million people are starving. Famine has been declared and is spreading. The cumulative impact of hunger and physical deprivation means people are dying every day,” they said.
Despite the well-documented horrors that have unfolded for almost two years under Israel’s siege of the Palestinian territory and enforced starvation of the enclave’s civilian population as they try to survive under military fire, “world leaders fail to act”.
“States must use every available political, economic, and legal tool at their disposal to intervene. Rhetoric and half measures are not enough. This moment demands decisive action,” the aid groups said.
“History will undoubtedly judge this moment as a test of humanity,” they said, adding that UN members must take action, or their “complicity” will set a “dangerous precedent for the future”.
Christopher Lockyear, a signatory to the joint statement and the secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said on Monday that Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza amounts to “the systematic destruction of a people”.
MSF is clear, Lockyear said: “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and doing so with absolute impunity.”
“The Israeli military has attacked everything and everyone in Gaza,” he added.
Signatories to the statement also include Islamic Relief Worldwide, ActionAid International, CARE International, Handicap International, Save the Children International, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Médecins du Monde.
On Tuesday, Navi Pillay, the chairwoman of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said the world body had determined that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza.
Among those most responsible, based on their own statements, for the genocide were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant and President Isaac Herzog, Pillay said.
The UN Commission, in its report, “concludes that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs took to social media to call the report’s findings “fake” and accused the authors of “serving as Hamas proxies”.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military announced the opening of another route south for those fleeing Gaza City. The military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Col. Avichay Adraee, wrote on social media that the new route, along the Salah al-Din street hugging Gaza’s coastline, will open for those heading south for two days starting Wednesday at 12 pm local time.
An estimated 1 million Palestinians were living in the Gaza City region before warnings to evacuate began ahead of the offensive, and the Israeli military estimates 350,000 people have left the city. A UN estimate Monday said that over 220,000 Palestinians have fled northern Gaza over the past month. But hundreds of thousands more have stayed behind.
An Israeli military graphic suggested its troops hope to control all of the Gaza Strip except for a large swath along the coast by the end of the current operation.
Israeli forces have carried out multiple large-scale raids into Gaza City over the course of the war, causing mass displacement and heavy destruction, only to see militants regroup later. This time, Israel has pledged to take control of the entire city, which experts say is experiencing famine.
Since the morning, at least 29 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across the war-devastated Gaza Strip, medical sources say.
Of them, 17 were killed in besieged Gaza City, where Israel’s military is intensifying its push for further displacement of Palestinians and to seize the territory’s largest urban centre.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 64,964 people and wounded 165,312 since October 2023.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA & AGENCIES
