A senior Palestinian diplomat to the United Nations has sounded alarm over Israel’s ongoing siege of northern Gaza, in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed over the last week and hundreds of thousands of civilian residents are either trapped or ordered to flee amid
intense bombardment.
“What is happening in northern Gaza now is a genocide within the genocide,” Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya, the deputy permanent observer to the UN, wrote on X.
Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said about 400,000 Palestinians are trapped in northern Gaza, with the Israeli military not allowing anyone to leave the area despite issuing an evacuation order.
In
Jabalia, desperate residents are posting about their dire situation on social media with one declaring, “We will not leave, we die and we don’t leave.” Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera that Israel has “prevented the entry of food supplies to the north for 10 days”, describing what is happening in Jabalia as “a crime against humanity”. Intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory, accused Israel of committing “another massacre”, adding that its troops “have accepted to be willing executioners of a genocidal plan”. “It blows my mind to think that WE KNOW what Israel is doing and altogether we cannot stop it. Looking at where we were 100 years ago, no much progress has been achieved,” she said in a post on X.