AGENCIES

Medicine stocks are critically low due to the aid block in Gaza, making it hard to keep hospitals even partially operational, the World Health Organization said yesterday.

“We are critically low in our three warehouses, on antibiotics, IV fluids and blood bags,” WHO official Rik Peeperkorn told reporters in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem.

The United Nations said its analysis of 36 recent Israeli strikes in Gaza showed only women and children were killed and decried the human cost of the war.

The UN rights office also warned that expanding Israeli evacuation orders were resulting in the “forcible transfer” of people into ever-shrinking spaces in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani warned the military strikes across Gaza were “leaving nowhere safe”.

Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency said a pre-dawn Israeli air strike yesterday killed 10 members of the same family, including seven children, in the southern city of Khan Yunis.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the attack, adding in a separate statement that it had struck approximately 40 “terror targets” across Gaza over the past day, reports AFP.

Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.

Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.

“Ten people, including seven children, were brought to the hospital as martyrs following an Israeli air strike that targeted the Farra family home in central Khan Yunis,” agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP. Witnesses also reported continuous and intensive Israeli tank fire in Khan Yunis.

Medics and rescuers transported the dead and injured to hospital in multiple ambulances, with several bodies wrapped in white shrouds and blankets, AFP footage of the aftermath showed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday reiterated his pledge to bring back the hostages still held in Gaza in a message marking the Jewish Passover holiday.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump suggested progress in hostage release talks, telling a cabinet meeting on Thursday that “we’re getting close to getting them back”.

In a video message for Passover -- a holiday celebrating the biblical liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt -- Netanyahu said “for many families there will be empty chairs”.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have become internally displaced by the war, with many making daily trips on foot to fill plastic containers with water from the few wells still functioning in remoter areas - and even these do not guarantee clean supplies.

The Palestinian Water Authority stated that most of its wells had been rendered inoperable during the war.

On March 22, a joint statement by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics and the Water Authority said more than 85 percent of water and sanitation facilities and assets in Gaza were completely or partially out of service.

Palestinian and United Nations officials said most of Gaza’s desalination plants were either damaged or had stopped operations because of Israel’s power and fuel cuts.