The Israel-U.N. Interaction at the Rafah Border and the Gaza Airfield Anomaly: a Response to Israel
The chief executive officer of Save the Children, one of the biggest nongovernmental aid organizations, said when she visited the Rafah crossing a month ago, fewer than 140 trucks were making it in every day — compared to an average of about 500 a day before the war.
Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. Security Council said his government was committed to improving access at the Rafah border crossing and reactivating another land crossing at Kerem Shalom in Israel.
Israel has said the lack of aid is due to U.N. inefficiency. Israel has accused, without providing evidence, a dozen employees of the U.N. agency that’s the main aid group for Palestinians, UNRWA, of participating in the Oct. 7 attack. The claim prompted many donors, including the United States, to withhold much-needed funding. The European Commission on Friday said it welcomed an UNRWA investigation into the allegations and was restoring funding.
Aid agencies say they can send more food and medicine to Gaza, but they can’t because of bureaucratic difficulties.
There are at least 100 people dead in Gaza this week after they died in a attempt to get to a convoy of trucks delivering food. The Israeli military said that many Palestinians were killed in the crush to get to the trucks, and that its troops opened fire in a way that jeopardized the force.
Gaza is an anomaly — a densely populated territory with borders under foreign military control. With Israel’s refusal to allow in more aid, famine has descended on a population weakened by five months of war.
On Thursday, Jordan dropped seven tons of supplies over northern Gaza — the first aid shipment to the area in about a month. The pallets were loaded with cardboard boxes containing rice, flour, sugar, tea and milk, along with sanitary napkins.
On the airfield on Thursday, photographers were prevented from photographing the flag of another Arab country on one of the pallets; saying it was one of two Arab nations participating in the airdrops that day that did not want their participation publicized. On the tarmac was a Qatari cargo plane that had intended to participate in an airdrop before it developed mechanical problems.
Israel permits a trickle of aid to enter through the country’s sole working land border, but on Thursday this aid will be dropped in order to get food to Gaza’s starving population.
On the tarmac at the King Abdullah II air base near the city of Zarka, more pallets were waiting to be loaded by Jordanian military personnel onto cargo planes for drops later in the day. The meals, similar to military meals-ready-to-eat for a population with little fuel for cooking, featured Arab dishes including mansaf, Jordan’s national dish made of lamb, dried yogurt and rice.
It’s hard to tell where a pallet of food landed in northern Gaza. The planned airdrops, which were conducted with Israeli approval, are still subject to change. The military of Jordan said that the wind blew a pallet into Israel while most of the others landed in northern Gaza.
Since the beginning of the war, Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to enter the Gaza Strip. It’s hard to tell what’s happening on the ground, because of disrupting phone and internet service. At the same time, Israeli strikes have killed at least 122 local journalists and media workers in Gaza since October, according to U.N. reports.
In a statement Friday, the foreign secretary of the U.K. said that in February only half the number of trucks crossed into Gaza as did in January.
She said a Save the Children employee in Gaza reported that doctors were sending premature infants home to die because they did not have incubators to treat them. At least six children have died so far from malnutrition or from eating animal feed, the only food available, according to aid groups.
Source: Aboard Jordan’s aid airdrop over Gaza, a last resort for relief to Palestinians there
Israel’s aid airdrop over Gaza, a last resort for relief to Palestinians there, says Ahmed al-Haj Salem
The Israeli military said that it had to search all vehicles for any weapons that could be used by Hamas. In response to the attack, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 30,000 civilians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
On Friday, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza posted on X (formerly Twitter) that thousands of Palestinians desperate for food gathered at the same spot where civilians were killed on Thursday.
Israel denies that it is blocking aid but aid groups say Israel has presented so many obstacles to deliveries through the Rafah crossing from Egypt that the food shipments have slowed to a trickle.
Salem said the crowd, desperate for food, dispersed when an Israeli tank appeared. But after it retreated they came back and stormed the trucks. He said that is when Israeli soldiers opened fire. Israel said it was using tanks to protect the convoy of private contractors.
Salem walks miles to find food for his family in Gaza, as he does most of the time. Even for those with money, there is no food available to buy.
With most of Gaza’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, there are few ambulances and even fewer hospitals, all trying to operate without electricity or basic medical supplies. Salem was taken to the hospital in a horse-drawn cart.
Israel acknowledges that it opened fire in self-defense but it says most of the dead were killed when they were trampled or run over by trucks.
Ahmed al-Haj Salem was hit by a bullet in the leg while standing near a truck, and he is currently being treated at a hospital in Gaza City. “I fell to the ground and there was another shot fired that hit my hand.”
Source: Aboard Jordan’s aid airdrop over Gaza, a last resort for relief to Palestinians there
Excess deaths in Gaza for next 6 months projected in first-of-its-kind effort by the Center of Humanitarian Health and Johns Hopkins University
The air force was unhooking the chains to let the boxes go out of the cargo door.
The researchers don’t want to predict the future. “These are projections, not predictions,” says Paul Spiegel, the director of the Center of Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University and study co-author. They’re not projecting what would happen if war were to happen, but how climate scientists would project future warming under different carbon emissions scenarios.
If the current talks do not succeed, the humanitarian crisis could claim over 11,000 lives by August 6 as a result of the 29,000 deaths documented by the Gaza Ministry of Health last week. Now, the death toll exceeds 30,000.
The researchers used data from Israel’s war on Gaza to estimate casualty numbers from unexploded bombs, and used injury data from Gaza to determine the number of wounds in the population at the time of the ceasefire. Whether a wounded person dies depends in part on their access to health care.
For six months of war comparable to the early stages, they took the average casualties from October 15 through January 15 and spun them forward over the next six months. They assumed fighting would get more intense in August, the worst month of the conflict so far that has claimed more than 11,000 lives.
“Escalation might involve indiscriminate bombing in densely populated areas or Israeli forces could decide to flood the tunnels with sea water” he says. “We don’t actually know what any of those scenarios will mean in terms of the armed groups’ actions.”
Increased chances for interrupted medical care and epidemics mean that non-violent deaths increase in the status quo and escalation scenarios. 66,716 excess deaths could be reached if ongoing violence were included in the authors’ assumptions, and 85,750 if it were not.
The scope of these projections can be seen by looking at estimated trauma deaths from two of history’s most devastating bombing campaigns during World War II, with Allied bombs killing some 25,000 over two days in Dresden and Nazi attacks taking approximately 40,000 lives in London over eight months.
Source: ‘Excess deaths’ in Gaza for next 6 months projected in first-of-its-kind effort
The Gaza conflict: ‘Excess deaths’ in Gaza for next six months projected in first-of-its-kind effort, says Sifreev
This initial report is very much a first draft. The new projections will include measures of mental health, as well as refining their assumptions based on experience.
“I hope we’ve made clear that there’s still going to be a lot of deaths if there’s a halt to the fighting,” says Spiegel, “so that we can begin to get enough food, water and medicine to where we should be.” There are blockades, assaults and damaged roads preventing aid from reaching those who need it.
Asi said that quantitative, evidence based efforts are valuable in forcing politicians and humanitarian agencies to confront the human cost of continued fighting. “But that’s just the first step. They have to be joined with other things.
Videos and images of the suffering in Gaza have made the conflict real to many around the globe and spurred some advocacy and political action. The fighting continues. Whether these numbers push political actors towards a lasting ceasefire “remains to be seen,” says Asi.
Source: ‘Excess deaths’ in Gaza for next 6 months projected in first-of-its-kind effort
The Toll of a War-Projection: Excess Deaths in Gaza for Next 6 Months Projected in First-of-its-kind Initiative
Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy. He has written for multiple publications including NPR, Nature News and the Dallas Morning News. He has a degree in biology from Cornell University. On X or bluesky, you can follow him.
The team used data on health status, malnutrition, sanitation and vaccination rates to estimate the possible toll of an outbreak. Such outbreaks would be especially hard on children, the researchers say, who are more vulnerable to infections, especially when they’re malnourished. More than half a million people are not eating enough, according to the UN.
When conflict zones have overcrowded shelters and poor sanitary conditions, there can be an infectious disease outbreak. It is difficult to know when an outbreak might happen, which is why the projections with and without epidemics were included.
Casualties go uncounted and injuries untreated as fighting rages on, leaving an imperfect tally of lives lost or damaged. It can be months or even years before you can see the indirect effects of conflict, which include missed cancer treatments, hospital bombings, and disease outbreaks in refugee camps.
Given those assumptions, the researchers project that an additional 3,250 people will die from traumatic injuries after fighting stops. The death toll after Ceasefire ranged from 6,550 to 11,580.
Spiegel thinks about how the health-care system is changing over time. The situation right now is dire, according to many of the trauma doctors the researchers consulted for the study. “If hospitals are functioning, a person with a head or chest wound might survive. It is likely that he or she will not.
Source: ‘Excess deaths’ in Gaza for next 6 months projected in first-of-its-kind effort
The cost of human actions: Projecting tomorrow’s deaths and projecting what we can do to solve it,” says Tak Igusa, civil engineer at Johns Hopkins University
“We wanted to define scenarios that were realistic and then based on those scenarios project what might happen, giving us some [upper and lower] bounds to work with,” says Tak Igusa, a civil engineer at Johns Hopkins University.
Ball says he spent his career looking backwards, trying to calculate the cost of war. “I’m never projecting tomorrow’s deaths, but I can imagine a whole new field coming from this [analysis]. We’re always going to be doing this from here forward.”
Some experts agree. Patrick Ball, director of research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group said it was a rigorous way of talking about the human cost of human decisions. While he stresses that the projections are speculative, that kind of speculation can be “immensely useful” in clarifying the potential costs of military action, which could both hold actors to account and help guide humanitarian action, he said.
“It shows that even if the bombing stops tomorrow, people will continue to die, not simply from the destruction of the health-care system but [loss of] access to food, water, vaccinations and shelter,” she says. “Even if the numbers aren’t perfect, putting this all together forces us to confront the true toll of what this means for the population there. We can’t say we didn’t anticipate this.
Yara Asi is a public health expert who studies the health impacts of war at the University of Central Florida and wasn’t involved in the analysis. She feels it’s an innovative and valuable effort.
Researchers wait until the conflict is over to get a full picture of how many lives were lost and what took them, because of the chaos of war.
The Gazan air strike and the safety of health care workers, civilians and civilians: The United Nations Population Fund on Gaza, the Emirati maternity hospital, and Gaza
The Health Ministry in Gaza said an Israeli air strike near a hospital killed at least 11 people and injured dozens of others.
At least two health care workers, including a paramedic, were among those killed after the strike near the gate of the Emirati maternity hospital, the health ministry said.
The Health Ministry identified the person as Abdul Fattah Abu Marai and said colleagues of the paramedic took his body to the nearby Kuwait hospital, while other children looked on and cried.
The Israeli military had previously declared that Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, would be a safe zone for civilians, and more than half of the enclave’s entire population is now crammed into it, with many living in makeshift tents over nearly every inch of available space.
The number of people in Rafah has swelled to over 1.5 million, and the number of airstrikes on it has stayed the same. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed that his forces will invade the city whether or not a temporary cease-fire deal is reached, despite dire warnings from humanitarian groups and many of Israel’s allies that any military operation in Rafah would have catastrophic consequences for civilians.
The news of Saturday’s strike was “outrageous and unspeakable,” the leader of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on social media, reiterating calls for a cease-fire and for the protection of health care workers and civilians.
The victims of the strike were sheltered near the Emirati maternity hospital, which still has functioning hospitals in Gaza. Dominic Allen, State of Palestine representative for the United Nations Population Fund, said that the hospital is managing half of the births in the enclave even though there are only five beds left.