UK, Australia and other countries urge end to Gaza war
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The United Kingdom and 24 other countries have called for an immediate end to the war in the Gaza Strip and criticised the Israeli government’s aid delivery model after hundreds of Palestinians were killed near sites distributing food.
France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand and other countries said more than 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid and condemned what it called the “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians”.
The majority of those killed were in the vicinity of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites, which the United States and Israel backed to take over aid distribution in the Gaza Strip from a network led by the United Nations.
“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the countries’ foreign ministers said in a joint statement.
The call for an end to the war and the way Israel delivers aid comes from several countries which are allied with Israel and its most important backer, the United States.
The GHF uses private U.S. security and logistics companies to get supplies into the Gaza Strip, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians.
Hamas denies the accusation.
The UN has called the GHF’s model unsafe and a breach of humanitarian impartiality standards, which the GHF denies.
The statement comes as Israeli tanks pushed into southern and eastern districts of the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah for the first time on Monday, an area where Israeli sources said the military believes hostages may be held.
The area is packed with Palestinians displaced during more than 21 months of war, hundreds of whom fled west or south after Israel issued an evacuation order, saying it sought to destroy infrastructure and capabilities of the militant group Hamas.
Tank shelling in the area hit houses and mosques, killing at least three Palestinians and wounding several others, local medics said.
To the south in Khan Younis, an Israeli air strike killed at least five people, including a husband and wife and their two children in a tent, medics said.
In its daily update, Gaza’s health ministry said at least 130 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1000 wounded by Israeli gunfire and military strikes across the territory in the past 24 hours, one of the highest such totals in recent weeks.
There was no immediate Israeli comment on the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis incidents.
Israeli sources have said the reason the army had stayed out of the Deir al-Balah districts was because they suspected Hamas might be holding hostages there.
At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in captivity in the Gaza Strip are believed to be still alive.
Families of the hostages have expressed concern for their relatives and demanded an explanation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Israel Katz and the army chief of how they will protect them.
“The people of Israel will not forgive anyone who knowingly endangered the hostages – both the living and the deceased. No one will be able to claim they didn’t know what was at stake,” the Hostage Families Forum Headquarters said in a statement.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and taking 251 hostages back to the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli tallies.
The Israeli military campaign against Hamas has since killed more than 59,000 people, according to health officials, displaced almost the entire population of the enclave and caused a humanitarian crisis.
Reuters
