Amman/ Geneva/Palestinian Territories — A UN rights expert said Monday there were “reasonable grounds” to determine that Israel has committed several acts of “genocide” in its war in Gaza, also evoking “ethnic cleansing”.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, concluded in a report.
UNRWA ‘lifeline of hope and dignity’
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres meanwhile defended the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, describing it as a “lifeline of hope and dignity”.
During a visit to the Wihdat refugee camp in the Jordanian capital Amman, Guterres said it would be “cruel and incomprehensible” to halt UNRWA’s vital services to Palestinian refugees across the region.
His remarks come as the agency faces a financing crisis after several key donor countries cut off funding following Israeli accusations that several UNRWA staff in Gaza were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack.
On Sunday, the chief of the UN agency, Philippe Lazzarini, said that Israel had definitively barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest.
The agency employs some 30,000 people across the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, providing healthcare, education and other basic services.
“We must strive to keep the one-of-a-kind services that UNRWA provides flowing because that keeps hope flowing,” Guterres said during his visit to the camp.
“In a darkening world, UNRWA is the one ray of light for millions of people. I see that hope here. Now more than ever, we must not take away that hope.”
He also sought to “honor the 171 women and men of UNRWA who have been killed in Gaza — the largest number of deaths of UN staff in our history”.
Israel had in January alleged that 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attack on southern Israel.
Multiple governments suspended their contributions to the agency, although several have since resumed payments.
The United Nations has launched both an internal and an independent investigation but has said Israel has not provided it with any evidence to support the claims against its staff.
Hamas’s attack resulted in the deaths of 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel responded with a relentless military campaign that has so far killed 32,226 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Fighting around two Gaza hospitals
Israel’s army said it was battling Hamas Monday around two Gaza hospitals, reporting some 20 Hamas men killed in the past day in close-quarters combat and air strikes.
Israel has launched raids on and near several Gaza hospitals since the war erupted in October.
Palestinians living near Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, have reported hellish conditions, including corpses in the streets, constant bombardment and the rounding up of men, who are stripped to their underwear and questioned.
Israel labelled the raids underway Monday around Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, and in the Khan Yunis neighborhood surrounding Al-Amal hospital, “precise operational activities”.
But the raids have sparked major fears for the patients and displaced people who are inside the facilities, which in some cases Israel has raided or cordoned off on more than one occasion.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Al-Amal had all of its entrances surrounded by military vehicles and that hospital staff were prohibited from leaving.
The raid at Al-Shifa is now in its eighth day and the military reported detaining some “500 terrorists affiliated with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organizations” and locating weapons in the area.
The Red Crescent on Sunday said military vehicles had also surrounded Nasser hospital, about a one-kilometer (half mile) drive from the Al-Amal medical center, but the situation at Nasser on Monday was unclear.