UNITED NATIONS/AMMAN/RAMALLAH, Oct 14 (NNN-XINHUA/PETRA/WAFA) – Palestine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, appealed to UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, yesterday, to do more to alleviate the tragedy in Gaza.
Mansour, speaking right before the UN Security Council held closed-door consultations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said, ambassadors from the Arab Group will meet with Guterres and asked him to do more.
“We are going to ask him to use the moral power of the office of the SG (secretary-general), in order to help us to implement this three-point plan: cease-fire, humanitarian assistance, and (efforts) not to allow ethnic cleansing to take place,” he said.
Mansour said, the Arab Group are united to stop the “Israeli carnage” against the Palestinian people, allow for humanitarian assistance and passage, and to not allow, after 75 years of the first Nakba, another Nakba to befall Palestinians by depopulating the Gaza Strip of its 2.3 million people, throwing them outside to Egypt and making it an Egyptian problem.
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Clashes with Israelis across the West Bank have left at least 11 Palestinians dead, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Health Ministry said yesterday.
Security sources told Xinhua that clashes erupted in Nablus, Tulkarm, Hebron, and other West Bank cities on the seventh day of the new round of violence between Hamas and Israel.
At least five deaths are from the city of Tulkarm, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, large numbers of people in West Bank cities took to the streets in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and condemnation of the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza.
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Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday that, he “fully” rejected Israel’s plan of displacing the Palestinian people in Gaza, during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken in Jordan’s capital Amman, reported Jordan’s state-run Petra News Agency.
The Palestinian president also emphasised the need to urgently open humanitarian corridors to the Gaza Strip for the supply of medical necessities, and providing water, electricity, and fuel to the residents.
Abbas cautioned about a looming humanitarian crisis in Gaza, due to the suspension of vital services and urged an end to settler attacks in the West Bank, as well as, “extremist actions” at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which are worsening the situation.
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The humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate as a result of Israeli airstrikes, said UN humanitarians on Thursday.
More than 338,000 people are now displaced, an increase of 30 percent since Wednesday. More than 218,000 displaced people are sheltering in schools run by the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
More than 2,500 housing units have been destroyed or severely damaged and rendered uninhabitable, while nearly 23,000 units have sustained moderate to minor damage, said the office.
At least 88 education facilities have been struck, including 18 UNRWA schools, two of which were used as emergency shelters for the displaced. This means that for the sixth consecutive day, more than 600,000 children have had no access to education at a safe place in Gaza, it said.
