As fears grew that the Gaza war could spread in the Middle East, Israel and Hamas traded blame for the explosion that killed hundreds in a Palestinian hospital and international aid organizations struggled against dwindling supplies and aerial bombardments to help civilians trapped by the fighting.
A humanitarian aid convoy of 20 trucks carrying life-saving supplies finally arrived in Gaza on Saturday, the first such delivery to the besieged territory since Hamas' surprise morning rocket against Israel on Oct. 7. Food, water and medicine – but no fuel – provided by the Egyptian Red Crescent and United Nations was handed over to the Palestinian Red Crescent with the support of U.N. personnel.
The World Health Organization said four of its trucks carrying specialized items for several thousand critical patients and basic essential medicines and health supplies for 300,000 people for three months were also moving through Egypt's Rafah border crossing on their way to Gaza.
However, the U.N. health agency, also working with the Egyptian and Palestine Red Crescent societies, said its supplies for Gaza "will barely begin to address the escalating health needs as hostilities continue to grow. A scaled up and protected aid operation is desperately needed."
"Two weeks since the start of hostilities, the humanitarian situation in Gaza – already precarious – has reached catastrophic levels," said Martin Griffiths, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief and emergency relief coordinator.
"It is critical that aid reaches people in need wherever they are across Gaza, and at the right scale," he said. "The people of Gaza have endured decades of suffering. The international community cannot continue to fail them."
Meantime, Hamas freed two American hostages held in Gaza since the war broke out and Israeli airstrikes pounded southern Gaza, packed with fleeing civilians.
On a visit to the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza on Friday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres appealed to all sides to allow the trucks through to deliver aid to Palestinians who have “no food, no medicine, no fuel.”
“We need to make them move,” he said at the crossing, where he described the trucks as a lifeline for the almost 2 million people in Gaza under siege and in danger of Israeli strikes. “It is impossible to be here and not to feel a broken heart."
International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric also joined in the appeal. "It is essential that warring parties maintain a minimum of humanity even during the worst of war. People in Gaza cannot be kept waiting for desperately needed aid," said Spoljaric.
"Hospitals are on the verge of collapse, and families are sleeping in the open with little food and water," she said. "We urgently call for a pause in the fighting and for humanitarian aid and first responders to be allowed in. Every hour that passes without increased assistance means more misery and suffering."
Hospital was at 'maximum capacity' when hit
U.S. President Joe Biden negotiated for the 20 trucks to be permitted to cross from Egypt into Gaza as part of a deal with Israel. Guterres also called for an immediate cease-fire to deliver humanitarian aid and warned "the region is on the precipice."
Health care providers throughout Gaza worked around the clock tending to the injured as food, water, medicine and other basic items ran out. Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli airstrike for the devastation at the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza that killed at least 500 people; Israel’s military denied responsibility.
As rockets lit up the darkened sky over Gaza that evening, one veered off course and broke up in the air before crashing to the ground, an Associated Press video analysis found. A large explosion in the area of hospital appeared in the videos seconds later.
"When that hospital was hit, it was fully operational," Griffiths told a U.N. Security Council briefing on Wednesday. "It had reached its maximum capacity. It was, therefore, overflowing with patients, including women and children."
It also had been giving aid to some of the internally displaced people "who either had nowhere else to go or were sheltering there in the expectation, or at least perhaps the hope, that it would provide safety," he said.
The destruction of a hospital that once cared for more than 45,000 patients a year "heaped further pressure on this crumbling, this failing, this sad health care system," Griffiths said, adding that the victims were rushed to "one of the many other hospitals in Gaza on the verge of collapse."
The World Food Program kept up demands for “unimpeded access” to get desperately needed humanitarian supplies into Gaza, while the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “grave fears about the toll on civilians in the coming days.”
Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the United Nations' longstanding relief agency for Palestinian refugees. told foreign ministers at an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that "an unprecedented catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes.”
"Gaza is being strangled and the world seems to have lost its humanity," he said. "Every hour we receive more and more desperate calls for help from people across the Gaza Strip. Thousands of civilians were killed over the last 12 days, including women and children."
In the wake of Tuesday's bombing of the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, the World Health Organization said four of Gaza's 35 hospitals were no longer functioning “due to severe damage and targeting.” Only eight of 22 primary health care centers operated by UNRWA were partially functional.
“The situation in Gaza is spiraling out of control. Every second we wait to get medical aid in, we lose lives,” WHO's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
In the two weeks since Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people in an unprecedented slaughter in Israeli history, Israeli's retaliatory bombing and raids have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including hundreds of children.
Griffiths' agency, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, cited figures from officials in Gaza and Israel as of Wednesday showing a combined 5,620 people have been killed and 19,225 others injured in the war.
A region on the 'brink'
On a visit to Israel fraught with physical and political danger, Biden backed Israel Defense Forces' claims by saying a U.S. assessment indicated that Israel was not responsible for the deadly explosion at the Gaza hospital.
"I’m not suggesting that Hamas deliberately did it, either," Biden told reporters on Wednesday. "It's not the first time Hamas has launched something that didn’t function very well."
Trucks carrying medical supplies and other aid were lined up at Egypt's Rafah crossing into Gaza but were unable to get through. Biden said the U.S. would provide US$100 million to help Palestinian civilians.
Bowing to pressure from the U.S. and other nations, Israel authorized deliveries of food, water and medicine to enter into Gaza from Egypt.
Meanwhile, skirmishes continued to flare along the border between Israel and southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, raising fears of the war expanding to a second front.
The Israel-Hamas war is “pushing the region to the brink,” Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told state-run television.
Saudi Arabia advised its citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. The U.S. told Americans not to visit the country and authorized citizens working in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon to leave the country.
Iran, Israel’s most determined foe and a key sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, was calling on its Arab neighbors to impose an oil embargo on Israel and expel all Israeli ambassadors.
On social media, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said “time is running out for political solutions; probable spread of war in other fronts is approaching unavoidable stage.”
Speaking in Tel Aviv, Biden assured the Israelis that “you are not alone.” The U.S. was positioning two of its largest aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean within quick striking distance of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
In New York, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian ceasefires to deliver aid to Gaza. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield rejected the measure because she said more time was needed for diplomacy and the resolution did not mention Israel’s right of self-defense.
This story has been updated with additional details and corrected to note that the 20 trucks carrying aid deliveries to Gaza did not bring any fuel.
