Places Not To Be - Gaza Interlude

[Humanitarian crisis in Gaza - Footage from CCTV]

I wanted to go an entire day without writing about Gaza, but to no avail - earlier today, 30 to 40 Palestinians were killed when Israeli shells landed near a UN school where civilians were seeking refuge.  Israel claims that it was responding after Hamas militants fired mortars from the school compound.

Today's Situation Report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) paints a grim picture:

"[T]the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is deteriorating while strikes and ground operations are reaching deeper into Gaza, including highly populated areas..the total number of casualties since the Israeli operation began in Gaza increased to 640 people, with the approximate percentage of women and children fatalities reaching 30 percent. The total number of Palestinians injured since the operation began reached over 2,800, approximately 45 percent of whom were children and women."

Other developments over the past twenty-four hours:

- Food shortages pose a growing risk, given the number of Palestinians who rely on food assistance provided by humanitarian organizations.  As the OCHA situation report explains:

"Prior to Israeli military operations in Gaza, 80 percent of the population relied on food assistance provided by international humanitarian actors. On 1 January, UNRWA food distribution restarted under extremely difficult circumstances after 13 days of suspension and is currently reaching almost 20,000 people/day with two-to-three months of dry food supplies. However, neither UNRWA nor WFP were able to distribute food on 6 January due to prevailing insecurity. Furthermore, WFP cannot reach 70% of its food stocks in warehouses due to insecurity."

- The ground invasion has also placed increasing stress on an already over-stretched health system.  According to OCHA, "[o]nly three out of 56 Palestinian MoH primary health care clinics are currently open due to restrictions on movement and the effective division of Gaza due to fighting."

Medical personnel have been particularly hard-hit, with six killed and thirty injured.

- There's also a lack of clean water; or, for that matter, any water - the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility reports that 800,000 people have no access to running water.  Furthermore, waste is beginning to contaminate the water network; many households are without electricity, and therefore can't purify water by boiling.

In addition, one million people in Gaza are now without electricity.

- Overall, children are particularly susceptible to trauma - for more information, see this statement from the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.

- All that said, Israel has allowed some humanitarian shipments into Gaza, including over 90 truckloads over the past two days.

I wish I had something positive to add, but nothing comes to mind.  What a [expletive deleted] [another expletive deleted] [yet a third expletive deleted] mess.