Calls mount to let aid in to besieged Gaza

By Mai Yaghi, with Hiba Aslan in Jerusalem

Aid agencies on Monday called for vital humanitarian supplies to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, warning time was running out to save millions of people as water supplies dried up and food and fuel stocks dwindled.

Israel has been bombing targets in Gaza as part of its war on Hamas, whose fighters broke through the heavily fortified border on October 7 and killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.

It was the worst attack in the country’s 75-year history. Israel’s relentless series of retaliatory air strikes have flattened neighbourhoods, killing at least 2,750, most of them ordinary Palestinians.

It has requested some 1.1 million Gazans — nearly half the population of 2.4 million — to leave the north of the densely populated enclave, in anticipation of a ground offensive against Hamas.

But in doing so — and cutting off water, food and fuel supplies until the conflict is over — it has heaped extra pressure on a territory already struggling under a years-long blockade.

As thousands massed on the Rafah border crossing with Egypt — the only one in the Gaza Strip not controlled by Israel — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out a temporary ceasefire to allow aid supplies in or foreigners out.

On Monday evening, strikes hit an area near the crossing, an AFP reporter said.

UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths is heading to the Middle East Tuesday, in the latest effort of frantic diplomacy to prevent the crisis worsening.

“We need access for aid,” he said in a video statement.

The regional director of the World Health Organization, Ahmed Al-Mandhari, gave a stark warning about the situation, which he said was barrelling towards a “real catastrophe”.

“There are 24 hours of water, electricity and fuel left” in Gaza, he told AFP in an interview in Cairo. If aid is not allowed in, doctors will have to “prepare death certificates for their patients”, he added.

Hamas’s military wing said later the group was holding 200 people, with about 50 more held by other “resistance factions and in other places”.

A video on the group’s official Telegram channel purported to show “one of the prisoners in Gaza” — a young