1.9m Palestinians flee to town size of airport

Now it’s supposed to feed, house and medically treat 1.9 million refugees. And it’s just triggered an international crisis.

The chief of the United Nations says it isn’t enough.

“We are simply unable to meet those in need inside Gaza”, Secretary-General António Guterres said while invoking an emergency clause of the UN charter Thursday morning.

He said the scenario being imposed on the Gaza Strip posed “a severe risk of collapse of the humanitarian system”.

This, he added, would soon cause “public order to completely break down due to desperate conditions, rendering even limited humanitarian assistance impossible”.

Israel reacts with outrage

“Guterres’ tenure is a danger to world peace,” Israel’s Foreign Minister asserted on Thursday morning. “The call for a cease fire in Gaza constitutes support of the Hamas terrorist organisation and an endorsement of the murder of the elderly, the abduction of babies and the rape of women.

“Anyone who supports world peace must support the liberation of Gaza from Hamas.”

At the centre of the diplomatic crisis is Israel’s attempt to relocate the population of Gaza to the tiny coastal town of al-Mawasi. Its normal population is less than 2000. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last remaining “humanitarian shelter” encompasses just a small part of this village that had been surrounded by a cluster of illegal settlements before occupational forces withdrew in 2005.

That’s less than half the 17 square kilometres of the Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport. And the IDF is delivering its warnings to Palestinian refugees by SMS and QR codes, which some may never receieve as the enclave’s electrical and communications infrastructure is hanging by a thread.

“This is an apocalyptic situation now because these are the remnants of a nation being driven into a pocket in the south,” UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths warned overnight.

“Once again, nowhere is safe in Gaza,” asserts the World Health Organisation (WHO). “We have seen what happened in northern Gaza. This cannot be the blueprint for the south.”

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

The Netanyahu government last weekend ordered the IDF to send its tanks and troops into the previous designated “safe zone”, the southern half of the 360 sqkm Gaza Strip.

Its border with Egypt remains closed despite Israeli appeals. Cairo says it refuses to take responsibility for the unfolding humanitarian disaster.

Now the IDF is engaged in heavy fighting in and around the enclave’s second-largest city, Khan Younis. It had been the focus of international relief efforts over the past two months – despite regular Israeli bombing.

“On a recent visit to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, the WHO team described the situation inside as catastrophic, with the building and hospital grounds grossly overcrowded with patients and displaced people seeking shelter,” the relief agency says.

The WHO adds more than 80 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s population – some 1.9 million people – have been forced out of their homes. Some 1.1 million of these have sought refuge in UN shelters.

The first round of Israeli evacuation orders issued this week for part of Khan Younis and camps to its east affected some 370,000 people. This had previously been part of an IDF-declared safe zone.

These civilians must now flee again.

And the WHO has been ordered to abandon its own facilities inside Gaza.

“This morning, WHO was contacted with advice to move as many medical supplies as possible from a warehouse in Gaza, situated in an area ordered to be evacuated,” it said. “Access to storage could become challenging over the coming days due to ground operations.”

Unrestrained anger

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder says even if all of al-Mawasi was included inside the IDF “safe zone”, it wouldn’t be big enough.

“It’s about 4 per cent of Gaza, and it would require 80 per cent of the population to be there,” he told Sky News.

“If you are going to forcibly evacuate people, you cannot send hundreds of thousands [of] people to places where there is no water and no toilets. I genuinely mean no toilets. Every corner I had turned to, there was another 5000 people who would appear overnight. They don’t have a single toilet. They don’t have a drop of water.”

The Netanyahu government is unhappy with the UN voicing its concerns.

On Monday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Lynn Hastings said that “the conditions required to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist”. She warned that the al-Mawasi plan was “an even more hellish scenario … one in which humanitarian operations may not be able to respond.”

On Wednesday, Israel revoked her visa.

“We will no longer be silent in the face of the bias of the UN!”, foreign minister Eli Cohen proclaimed on social media.

“Someone who did not condemn Hamas for the brutal massacre of 1200 Israelis … but instead condemns Israel, a democratic country that protects its citizens, cannot serve in the UN and cannot enter Israel!”

Israel had previously threatened to revoke UN visas after Guterres pointed out how the October 7 Hamas terror attack did not happen “in a vacuum” and that Palestinians had been “subject to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

More than 130 UN relief agency staff have so far been killed in Israeli bombings since the war began.

Emergency appeal

UN Chief Guterres said he was invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter which empowers him to address the Security Council with any matter he believes “may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”

He says he felt compelled to do so “given the scale of the loss of human life in Gaza and Israel in such a short amount of time”.

An outraged Israel launched its assault on Gaza after a murderous rampage by Hamas militants took the Netanyahu government by surprise, with many of the troops assigned to defend the border with Gaza repositioned to protect illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Some 1200 people were killed on October 7, including 33 children. About 130 remain hostages.

Guterres called the Hamas attack “brutal” and “appalling”. And he repeated calls for all hostages to be “immediately and unconditionally released”.

Israel’s counter-attack has so far taken an estimated 16,000 Palestinian lives. The WHO says about 10,000 of these were women and children. Israel insists at least 5000 were Hamas militants.

Guterres says this has “created appalling human suffering, physical destruction and collective trauma across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

“Hospitals have turned into battlegrounds”, he added. “And without shelter or the essentials to survive, I expect public order to completely break down soon”.

The WHO says it cannot comply with Israel’s demands to establish the al-Mawasi safe zone “without broad agreement, and unless fundamental conditions are in place to ensure safety and other essential needs are met, and a mechanism is in place to supervise its implementation”.