Rights and Accountability 20 March 2025
The bodies of Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli strikes are brought to the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, on 20 March.
APA imagesAround 600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Tuesday, when Israel resumed its full-scale military offensive on the territory.
More than 49,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023 and around 113,000 injured.
Israel’s renewed attacks shattered a ceasefire that had taken effect nearly two months earlier, the first phase of which expired earlier in March.
At least 110 people were killed on Thursday, according to Al Jazeera.
More than 1,000 people have been seriously injured since Tuesday, according to Dr. Muhammad Zaqout, an official with Gaza’s health ministry.
Gaza’s government media office said on Thursday that 70 percent of those killed were children, women and elderly people, pointing to the deliberate targeting of civilians.
The true number of fatalities is likely much higher, with the bodies of many people still under the rubble.
A 25-day-old baby girl, named Ella Osama Abu Daqqa, was rescued from the rubble after an Israeli air raid that killed her parents and brother along with another family that included a father and seven of his children. The newborn girl’s grandparents also survived the attack in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, Al Jazeera reported.
New displacement orders
While pummeling Gaza by air, land and sea, Israel issued new displacement orders pushing people from northern and eastern Gaza towards the coast as it expands its ground operations in the territory.
Reuters reported that the Israeli military dropped leaflets on residential neighborhoods in Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun in the north, the Shujaiya suburb east of Gaza City and towns in the east of Khan Younis in the south.
The Israeli military said that it was conducting “pinpoint” ground operations in central and southern Gaza to expand its no-go areas along the eastern boundary, as well as in the Shaboura area of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, along the Egyptian border.
Israeli troops had taken control of around half of the Netzarim corridor area that was used to control movement between northern and southern Gaza during the war, The Times of Israel reported.
Defense minister’s genocidal “final warning”
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, issued “a final warning” to the population of Gaza in an apparent declaration of genocidal intent.
“Things will become much more difficult, and you will pay the full price,” Katz said, adding that “evacuation of the population from combat zones will soon resume.”“Take the US president’s advice. Return the hostages and remove Hamas, and other options will open up for you, including relocation to other places in the world for those who choose,” Katz added. “The alternative is total destruction and total devastation.”
Katz’s statement will likely be added to a long list of declarations of genocidal intent by Israeli officials since October 2023.
“What you’re hearing is the sound of impunity,” Craig Mokhiber, a human rights lawyer, told The Electronic Intifada Livestream on Thursday, commenting on Katz’s video statement.
Mokhiber said that Katz is “committing crimes in public because the West, beginning with the United States, has guaranteed Israeli impunity.”
“That can only be described as a Nazi-like statement,” added Mokhiber, who resigned from his post as a UN human rights official in October 2023 in protest over the world body’s inaction in the face of Israel’s unfolding genocide.
Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “from now on, negotiations will be conducted only under fire,” referring to talks to secure the release of captives held in Gaza since October 2023 and towards a deal to bring the war in Gaza to a permanent end.
Unnamed senior Israeli officials told Israel’s Channel 12 that the military operations in Gaza would escalate “unless Hamas started showing flexibility in negotiations over the next day,” according to The Times of Israel.
Several senior Hamas figures have been killed since Tuesday, including members of its political bureau who held offices in Gaza’s ministries. On Thursday, the Israeli military claimed that it killed two Hamas security officials and another person who it said was a prominent operative for Islamic Jihad’s armed wing.
On Thursday, Hamas reiterated its commitment to the three-phase ceasefire deal signed in January and said that talks with mediators remained ongoing.
Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri accused Israel of attempting to impose a surrender agreement on the Palestinian people during an interview with the Gulf broadcast channel Alaraby on Tuesday.
Abu Zuhri said Washington and Tel Aviv were attempting to change the terms of the ceasefire agreement that Israel had signed and the US had guaranteed. That agreement included a path to end the war once and for all and assure the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.Now, according to Zuhri, the US and Israel want to alter the agreement so that it only involves the exchange of prisoners without any terms regarding aid or ending the war.
Despite this, Abu Zuhri said, Hamas had been willing to release dual US-Israeli nationals in exchange for a guarantee that Israel would begin negotiations towards phase two of the original agreement and implement the humanitarian protocols requiring the entry of aid into Gaza.
Israel, according to Abu Zuhri, refused these terms.
The US and Israel were now trying to impose their terms by shedding the blood of Palestinians, Abu Zuhri said, insisting that they would not succeed now in breaking the will of the Palestinian people and resistance where they had failed during 15 months of genocide before the ceasefire.
Military pressure
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to open the “gates of hell” if Hamas did not release all of the captives held in Gaza, despite the framework to secure their freedom already being in place.
During a Security Council meeting on Thursday, Khaled Khiari, a senior UN official, said that military pressure would only delay the return of the 24 captives believed to still be alive in Gaza – a view also shared by many in Israel’s security establishment.
Whether Israel has the capacity to sustain a prolonged military operation is an open question, with its army and public exhausted after extended and costly campaigns in both Gaza and Lebanon.Only 60 percent of reservists are showing up for duty, according to Israeli media reports.
Lack of trust in the government and low enthusiasm to fight a war without clear strategic goals has lowered morale.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem since Tuesday to protest moves by Netanyahu to consolidate his control over state apparatuses after he announced his intention to sack intelligence chief Ronen Bar on Sunday.
Aharon Barak – the former president of Israel’s high court – warned of a “severe rift between Israelis and themselves” in remarks reported by Israeli outlets this week.
Barak told the Israeli outlet Ynet that “this rift is deteriorating and in the end, I fear, it will be like a train that goes off the tracks and plunges into a chasm causing a civil war.”
As if to illustrate Barak’s fears, the Israeli military dismissed two reserve officers this week after they publicly stated they would not go back to fight in Gaza.
“The thing that will help the most right now to protect my people is to refuse to take part in fighting in the service of filthy traitors in complete contrast to the interests of the people of Israel,” one of the officers, who served in military intelligence, had stated.
Barak represented Israel during the International Court of Justice’s initial proceedings in the genocide complaint brought against Israel by South Africa.
In January 2024, the court ordered “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide by ensuring access to humanitarian aid and basic services.
Israel has not complied with the legally binding orders of the court, which will be holding hearings in April about Israel’s humanitarian obligations toward Palestinians after the UN General Assembly passed a resolution requesting an advisory opinion on the matter.
UN workers killed
Israel ordered Gaza’s crossings shut on 2 March, preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, medical and commercial goods and tightening the vise on the civilian population in the territory.
Hospitals lack drugs, essential medical equipment and oxygen and other supplies, according to the health ministry’s Zaqout. Facilities are also lacking solar power needed to run generators – a necessity after Israel shut off the supply of electricity to Gaza in October 2023.
Zaqout added that patients urgently need referrals outside of Gaza and that hospitals in the territory need the support of medics from outside the territory to manage the crisis.
Al Mezan, a human rights group based in Gaza, said that many injured people were being “transported to hospitals on animal-drawn carts” due to fuel shortages resulting from Israel’s closure of the crossings grounding ambulance fleets.
Palestinians flee their homes in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza after the Israeli army ordered the displacement in several areas of the Strip following heavy strikes, 20 March.
APA imagesFive employees of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, were among those killed since Tuesday, according to agency head Philippe Lazzarini.
“They were teachers, doctors and nurses serving the most vulnerable,” Lazzarini stated posted on X.
Lazzarini said that 284 UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
On Wednesday, Marin Valev Marinov, a Bulgarian national working for the UN, was killed in a strike on a guesthouse for the UN Office for Project Services in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.
Five others were injured and “two of the wounded sustained lower limb amputations,” according to Al Mezan, a human rights group, citing medical sources.
Jorge Moreira da Silva, the head of UNOPS, told reporters that the deadly blast was not related to the removal of unexploded ordinance.
“This was not an accident, this was an incident,” Moreira added, noting that “these premises were well known” by the Israeli military and that “everyone knew who was working inside the premises – it was UN personnel, UNOPS personnel.”
Israel denied responsibility for the deadly strike on the UN facility. But Al Mezan said that “Israeli forces fired at least one missile” at it.
Al Mezan added that the targeting of humanitarian workers and the blocking of aid at the crossings “is a deliberate effort to undermine relief operations, inflict severe harm on civilians, and make living conditions for the population unbearable – all under the watchful eye of the international community.”
Israeli forces were targeting “Palestinian civilians across Gaza, carrying out mass killings by deliberately bombing densely populated homes, tents and shelters,” according to Al Mezan.
Israel is also using starvation as a weapon of war, the rights group added, resulting in “severe shortages of food and essential supplies [that] have deepened the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”
Yemen
Meanwhile, flights out of Israel’s main airport were grounded twice on Thursday while sirens were also sounded in the Jerusalem area and the occupied West Bank after rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv from both Gaza and Yemen, reportedly causing no casualties or damage.
Israeli media reported that Ansarullah, the movement that governs Yemen, fired two ballistic missiles toward the country on Thursday, the first one sending millions of people to bomb shelters at 4 am.
Hamas said that it fired a barrage of rockets towards Tel Aviv on Thursday, which, like the missiles fired from Yemen, the Israeli military claimed to have intercepted.
On Wednesday, Trump vowed that Ansarullah “will be completely annihilated” and warned Iran against sending additional supplies to the Yemeni group.
American airstrikes hit the Yemeni capital Sanaa and northwest Saada on Wednesday night after an air campaign killed more than 50 people over the weekend, including children, AP reported.
US President Barack Obama began waging a brutal war against Ansarullah in 2015, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, causing one of the world’s worst – and ongoing – humanitarian disasters.
Years of American-backed bombing failed to defeat Ansarullah, which appears only to have grown its strength and capabilities.
On Sunday, the movement’s leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, vowed that US attacks would not deter Yemen from standing by Palestinians in Gaza.
He urged Yemenis to demonstrate the next day to show their support for the country’s stance, a call they answered in their millions.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting.
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