People in northern Gaza running out of means to survive, U.N. says

JERUSALEM - Israel’s intensifying military assault on northern Gaza has pushed areas of the enclave to the edge of humanitarian collapse, according to U.N. and aid officials, with the area’s last functioning hospital close to failing, emergency responders unable to move freely and food supplies dipping toward dangerous levels after a near-total blockade on aid deliveries to the area since the beginning of the month.

“People suffering under the ongoing Israeli siege in North Gaza are rapidly exhausting all available means for their survival,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres wrote Wednesday on X.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a Middle East tour to cool regional tensions, also raised the alarm. “It is imperative that we continue to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the extraordinary challenges that the children, the women, the men of Gaza are encountering every single day,” he told reporters Thursday in Qatar, where he also announced plans for more cease-fire talks.

Conditions have deteriorated in the weeks since the Israeli military launched a renewed offensive in northern Gaza, an area where more than 400,000 civilians are estimated to be living amid destroyed buildings and shattered infrastructure. Israel says the goal is to keep Hamas from regrouping in the north.

Basic functions in the worst-hit areas are collapsing, residents and aid workers said, and more than 770 people have been killed, according to Gaza’s civil defense force. The force, which conducts search-and-rescue operations, said it was pulling out of north Gaza because of threats from Israeli troops, spokesman Mahmoud Basal said in a statement.

“Several team members have been targeted and injured, and others are lying on the streets, bleeding, with no one able to rescue them,” he said on Telegram early Thursday.

Some medical supplies are now in such short supply that doctors are forced to choose which of the injured to treat, according to Mohammed Wadi, the deputy project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza. “My colleagues tell me that now they have to decide which patient can we help, which ones we leave to die,” Wadi said by phone from Gaza City.

Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said late Thursday that a U.N. convoy brought some fuel and supplies to the facility and evacuated 23 patients. But before the vehicles arrived, Israeli forces fired on the hospital, damaging its intensive care units, he said in a phone interview. He estimated that the hospital was serving more 150 people wounded in the fighting.

“We are doing our duty,” he said. “We are trying to save their lives.”

In addition to sending in troops and tanks, the Israeli military has also launched punishing airstrikes. In some areas, victims have remained under rubble for days as emergency crews were prevented from reaching them, the U.N. humanitarian aid office, OCHA, said earlier this week.

Israeli officials say they have worked to warn civilians away as the offensive has ramped up, issuing evacuation orders and directing residents to head as far south as possible. More than 60,000 people have already been displaced from northern Gaza to Gaza City, OCHA said this week.

But many civilians report that routes farther south were blocked by Israeli troops and active combat, leaving them effectively trapped. Residents also said Israeli forces had detained people seeking to evacuate.

Tasneem Salem, 28, said she was separated from her husband, Nafez, after they presented themselves to Israeli soldiers in the northern town of Beit Lahia on Tuesday. They were each held for hours with groups of other residents, with men in one area and women and children in another, she said by phone Thursday.

Salem was searched and eventually released, along with her two daughters, mother-in-law and other relatives. She walked for hours toward Gaza City, but her husband never appeared. According to Nafez’s brothers, he was detained by the military.

“The last call I received from him was when I was waiting for his family. He told me that he was waiting to be searched,” Salem said. “He asked me to take care of the girls and stay with his family wherever they went.”

Advocates said thousands, including the elderly and children, were unable to travel at all in the war-ravaged north. And many who have been displaced multiple times in the past year would rather take their chances by staying put than head to already overcrowded tent camps in the south.

Hisham al-Kahlout, 38, also walked for hours with his family to reach Gaza City, after the military ordered residents in the north to report to the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia on Wednesday.

Once they arrived at the hospital, the young men were interrogated, while others were screened by soldiers using biometric software, Kahlout said by phone. The troops released his family at 5 p.m. local time, and they made their way to Gaza City.

“I never considered, nor will I ever consider, heading south,” Kahlout said. “Here, death may come quickly from the shells, but in the south, it’s a slower, more painful death from humiliation, overcrowding, and sickness in the tents.”

Critics say Israel’s actions in the north suggested it has begun to implement a plan endorsed by far-right government ministers to gain control of parts of Gaza by forcing civilians out and shooting or starving those who are left through a military siege. The military and senior government officials have denied the accusations.

Blinken raised concerns about the alleged plan to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an in-person meeting this week, according to U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. Netanyahu responded that such a proposal “was absolutely not our policy,” they said. But when U.S. officials urged the prime minister and his top aide Ron Dermer to publicly reject the plan, the Israeli officials did not commit to doing so.

In Qatar, Blinken reiterated what he said was U.S. opposition to the plan. “The United States fully and fundamentally rejects it,” he said. “We reject any effort to create a siege, to starve people, to hive off northern Gaza from the rest of Gaza.”

He also said that U.S. and Israeli negotiators will travel to Doha in the coming days to attempt to reach a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza. The upcoming meeting represents the latest effort by the United States to forge a cease-fire after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Israel confirmed that its spy chief, David Barnea, would depart Sunday for a meeting with CIA Director William J. Burns and the Qatari prime minister. But Blinken was unable to say what the framework for an agreement would look like. “I’m not going to get into any details of what’s on the table or potentially on the table,” he said.

Israel, meanwhile, has blamed the United Nations and humanitarian groups for the slow pace of aid delivery to northern Gaza - even though the Israeli military controls the entry of all goods into Gaza and determines the routes by which aid can be delivered inside the enclave.

U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters in New York on Wednesday that “the Israeli siege has prevented the World Food Program from reaching people in northern Gaza for the past three weeks.” The agency was only able to deliver one convoy to Gaza City, he said.

“At this time there is no obstacle to the introduction of humanitarian aid into the northern Gaza Strip,” the government said in a court filing Wednesday in response to a lawsuit brought by several Israeli human rights organizations petitioning for more aid to the enclave.

Aid groups said Israel has not approved most requests from humanitarian organizations to bring food and other critical supplies from the south to the north. And getting any relief into Gaza at all has been complicated by the lack of security and looting of trucks seeking to ferry aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south - the main crossing point for aid since Israel seized and closed the Rafah crossing with Egypt in May.

“It’s a little charade we play day in and day out about trying to navigate the nuances of a crossing that’s engineered to fail,” said Georgios Petropoulos, the head of OCHA’s Gaza operation.

Gaza officials said rescue and paramedic teams would pull out of north Gaza after Israeli forces targeted crews Wednesday, wounding at least three members and forcing another to leave an area where they were working. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A civil defense rescue worker, Mohammed Tamous, said his team was working in the Beit Lahia area when similar Israeli quadcopters surrounded them and, via loudspeakers, and ordered them to abandon their vehicles and rescue gear and head to a nearby hospital.

“When we left, they attacked us by firing a group of shells,” Tamous said in a voice recording sent to journalists Thursday. “A large number of us were injured, and others scattered in the streets, not knowing where to go.”

Some residents asked the paramedics to leave the area, Tamous said, out of fear that the crews were being targeted.

“We are not terrorists; we provide humanitarian services,” he said.

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Harb reported from London, Parker from Jerusalem, Hudson from Doha and Balousha from Hamilton, Ontario.