Hospitals and aid groups say they are under increasing pressure.
“The humanitarian system is collapsing day by day,” Ahmad al-Shawa, the director of the umbrella group Palestinian NGO Network, told NBC News. “We have almost nothing in our warehouses to deliver to the people,” he said.
The United Nations body for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said that nearly 1 in 3 children in Gaza City were now malnourished.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva that children in Gaza are “extremely weak” and that “many will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement.”
He criticized Israel’s restrictions on aid. “It is a manufactured and fabricated famine. It is deliberate. Food has been used as an instrument of war,” he said.
And the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said Thursday that that two people had died due to malnutrition in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 271 since Israel launched its assault on the besieged enclave.
Israel has repeatedly denied that widespread starvation is taking place.
Hamas said earlier this week that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal from Arab mediators, but Israel has yet to say whether it will accept the deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been publicly making the case for pressing ahead with military action.
In a 40-minute sit down with the Triggernometry podcast, Netanyahu rejected allegations from human rights groups that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, telling the podcast those claims were a fraud. “If we wanted to commit genocide, we would have done it in one afternoon. We have the capacity, but we don’t do that,” he said.
Netanyahu said that he was aware Israel had “work to do” to win over people across the West, citing young people in particular.
“We Jews have been fighting and losing the propaganda war for about 2,500 years. What’s different now is that we’re winning the ground war,” he said.
In recent days his diplomatic approach has involved a war of words with the leaders of Australia and France over their decisions to recognize a Palestinian state.