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Herzi Halevi, the Israeli army chief, praised the Palestinian Authority for its collaboration with occupation forces in the West Bank. Halevi said that the PA “has been working in recent weeks to prevent demonstrations and marches in support of Hamas and its massacre.”
“We have been under constant bombardment for over a month now,” writes Ghada Al-Haddad from Gaza. “How much more must we lose before the attack stops?”
Obscuring Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians appears to be official UN policy. Statement after statement from the organization’s agencies and leaders express horror over specific attacks in Gaza and the mounting death toll, but do not mention Israel.
Palestinian children inspect the debris at the Khaled Ibn Al-Walid mosque in Khan Younis after it was hit by Israeli bombardment on 9 November.
DPA
Another 50,000 people fled northern Gaza on foot through the corridor opened by the Israeli military, most carrying only a few personal belongings, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported. Displaced persons interviewed by UN monitors “indicated that they did not know where they would stay overnight.” More than 1.5 million people are now internally displaced within Gaza, OCHA said in its daily report.
Human Rights Watch said that Israeli ground forces were “encircling and moving deeper into Gaza City” and were within two kilometers of al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest medical facility. The rights group added that “civilians who remain in place after an evacuation warning — including those who can’t leave, fear moving, or don’t want to be displaced — don’t lose their protections as civilians under the laws of war. No area is a free-fire zone.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor chairman, Ramy Abdu, warned of massacres in the vicinity of hospitals in the coming hours because Israel views them as military targets “and acts on this basis.”
US President Joe Biden said that the Israeli military will permit a four-hour pause in combat operations in parts of northern Gaza each day to facilitate the movement of civilians to the south, the Associated Press reported. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesperson, said the “tactical local pauses” are limited in time and area. The UN estimated on 8 November that hundreds of thousands Palestinians remain in the northern areas of Gaza and “are struggling to secure the minimum amounts of water and food to survive.”
Despite President Biden casting doubt on the figures provided by hospitals in Gaza, the death toll from the Israeli military’s bombardment may be higher than the Palestinian Ministry of Health numbers, a US official told Congress. Barbara Leaf, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the number of deaths are “very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited,” The Hill reported.
The Israeli military said that Palestinian fighters have launched some 9,500 rockets from Gaza since 7 October, more than the combined total of the 2006 Lebanon and 2014 Gaza wars.
The Palestinian health ministry said that nearly 250 people had been killed in recent hours, bringing the death toll in Gaza to 10,818, including 4,412 children. Some 2,650 people are reported missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings, including 1,400 children.