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Table of Contents
EXPLAINER
UN agency for Palestinian refugees say it can no longer provide services in northern Gaza, citing staff shortages and a ‘collapse of social order’.
Here’s how things stand on Saturday, February 24, 2024:
Humanitarian crisis, fighting on the ground:
- A UNRWA official says the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees can no longer provide services in north Gaza, citing staff shortages and a “collapse of social order” amid Israeli attacks on civilians and restrictions on food aid access that have left the population starving.
- An Israeli strike on a home housing displaced Palestinians killed at least 24 people in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah on Friday. Staff at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital say they are still receiving wounded people, and the death toll is expected to rise.
- Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported that 104 people were killed and 160 injured in Israeli attacks between Thursday and Friday afternoon, according to the latest situation report from the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
- Israeli forces have raided villages, towns and cities across the occupied West Bank, searching homes and clashing with locals resisting the incursions, Palestine’s state news agency, Wafa, reports.
Diplomacy
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released his most detailed vision yet for a post-war Gaza. It includes maintaining indefinite military control over the Strip; ceding the enclave’s civilian administration to Palestinians with no link to Hamas – he didn’t cite the Palestinian Authority (PA) – and creating a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Egypt that Israel will control.
- The PA has criticised the plan, saying security can only be obtained through the establishment of a Palestinian state.
- The UN’s top court has completed its fifth day of hearings following a request by the UN General Assembly to issue an opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has repeated his criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza, saying it “is not war, it is genocide”.
- Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has warned that states that transfer weapons to Israel amid its war on Gaza could be complicit in “atrocity crimes”.
- Reuters news agency has reported that talks are under way in Paris in what appears to be the most serious push in weeks to halt the fighting in Gaza.
- Singapore has iterated its calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at G20 meetings in Brazil, local media have reported.
Regional tensions
- The United States military says it has destroyed seven antiship cruise missiles that Yemen’s Houthi rebel group planned to launch at targets in the Red Sea.
- US Central Command (CENTCOM) said the UK-owned bulk carrier MV Rubymar, which was attacked by Houthi forces last weekend in the Red Sea, is slowly taking on water, leaking oil and it poses an environmental hazard in the region.
