GENEVA, Oct 3 : The UN has stated there is no safe place for the Palestinians who have been ordered to leave Gaza City, as the global body has called Israeli-designated humanitarian zones in the south as “places of death.”
“The notion of a safe zone in the south is farcical,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder told reporters in Geneva after visiting Gaza, reports Times of Israel.
Describing the infrastructure being turned to rubble and the dangers in the area, he noted that “bombs are dropped from the sky with chilling predictability; schools, which had been designated as temporary shelters are regularly reduced to rubble, (and) tents? are regularly engulfed in fire from air attacks.”
The IDF have designated areas such as Khan Younis and the coastal strip of Al-Mawasi as humanitarian zones, urging civilians to move there and directing aid deliveries to those sites.
Israel says no ground operations are conducted in these areas and that its forces take special precautions to mitigate, if not completely avoid, civilian casualties.
Elder insisted that “the issuance of a general or a blanket evacuation order to civilians does not mean that those who remain behind lose their protection as civilians”.
As such, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled Gaza City in recent weeks amid the new IDF ground offensive. The military has urged them to move south, to a newly-established humanitarian zone in Khan Younis.
Israel first declared the area a safe zone early in the war but has carried out repeated strikes on it since, hitting Hamas hideouts and installations.
Likewise, the Israeli military had earlier urged Palestinians to relocate to a “humanitarian area” in Al-Mawasi on the coast, where it says aid, medical care and humanitarian infrastructure will be provided, Elder remarked.
However, pointing out the horrible condition of the area, he said that Al-Mawasi, “is now one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It’s grotesquely overcrowded and has been stripped of the most basic essentials of survival”.
The IDF has carried out repeated air raids in Khan Younis and Al-Mawasi, including efforts to eliminate Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif.
The UN had begun in late 2023 “debunking this concept of a unilaterally-declared safe zone”, Elder said, stressing that “the law is very clear”.
“It is the responsibility of the occupying power, Israel, to ensure that a safe zone has all the essentials for survival: that is, nutrition, shelter and sanitation.
“None of those are present in a level that is needed by the people,” Elder said, adding that the UN at the start had “at least assumed that these places would not be bombed”.
But over the past 18 months, the designated safe zones had been hit “dozens of time”, and “people in tents have suffered from airstrikes”.
While the Israeli military has acknowledged that it has been striking targets in or in the vicinity of declared humanitarian safe zones, it justified its move, stating that Hamas embeds its terror operatives in these places, arming them with weapons and installing command and control centres among the civilian population, using them as bait for its propaganda war.
Nonetheless, the UN, along with human rights groups, have strongly condemned Jerusalem’s ‘humanitarian zones’, and likened them to ‘death camps’ due to the IDF’s frequent airstrikes against Hamas targets in these areas, regardless of the civilian presence. (UNI)
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