A few more of Gaza’s 24,000 wounded allowed to exit strip as Israeli shelling continues

Internet connectivity slowly returned to the Gaza Strip on Monday morning following another night of devastating bombing during which more than 200 people were killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

A few more of Gaza's wounded — of whom there are over 24,000 in total due to ongoing Israeli airstrikes — were also allowed out of Gaza via the Rafah border crossing to seek treatment in Egypt, according to Egyptian authorities. Some of the hundreds of foreign passport holders who have permission to leave also exited Gaza on Monday.

In northern Gaza, Israeli Defense Forces continued to warn residents on Monday to leave the area, which is being heavily targeted in Israel’s ground operations and aerial bombardment campaign, and flee to the south of the strip. Residents have shared accounts over recent days noting that they received pamphlets from the IDF telling them this is their last chance to leave.

But the Gaza government media office said on Monday that it had received dozens of reports of people being killed as they were heading southward in areas designated by the IDF as “safe corridors” for exit from the north.

Israel first gave orders to northern Gaza’s 1.1 million residents to flee south on October 13, allowing 24 hours for their mass displacement. However, before the deadline was up, Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed dozens of Palestinians who were fleeing from northern to southern Gaza. 

Mohamed al-Gaga, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, was also killed on Monday along with a number of his family members after Israel bombed his house in the Nasr neighborhood in northwestern Gaza. 

46 other journalists have been killed since October 7, the government media office in Gaza said, while others, including Al Jazeera chief correspondent, have had to report on the killing of their own family members.

“The morning following the murder of Al Jazeera chief correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh’s family members, including his wife, daughter and son, on the 19th day of the war, a cold fear set into our hearts,” journalist Noor Swirki wrote. “We are all afraid we could be next, knowing that he is not the first among us to live through this ordeal.”

Other mounting casualties have been reported among staffers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East of whom 88 have been killed since October 7, “the highest number of United Nations fatalities ever recorded in a single conflict,” according to a statement released on Sunday by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Israel and Palestine, a UN agency working on humanitarian coordination. 

While limited convoys of aid continue to trickle into Gaza via the Rafah border crossing in a process that Egypt has said is hampered by cumbersome Israeli conditions, Jordanian air force personnel air-dropped urgent medical aid to the Jordanian field hospital in Gaza on Sunday at midnight, King Abdullah II of Jordan said. Israel confirmed that its authorities had coordinated with Jordan to facilitate the airdrop.

But after an entire month of the siege, the pace of aid deliveries is completely insufficient to deal with the growing humanitarian crisis in the strip. “The Gaza Strip is suffering from a severe famine, whereby citizens spend more than four hours to get bread and three [more] to get water,” the government media office said on Sunday.

No aid was allowed by the Israeli government to the besieged strip via Rafah from October 7 till October 20, even though approximately 2,100 trucks should have reached Gaza during that time, said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in a periodic report. By November 4, only 414 trucks had entered Gaza via Rafah, a rate the UNOCHA said is “less than 19 percent of what it used to be before the crisis.”

Meanwhile, Israel continues to refuse a “humanitarian pause” to allow for aid deliveries, despite pressure from the US to facilitate limited pauses to hostilities. 

With hospitals in the strip increasingly unable to respond to the severity of the crisis, another 17 wounded Palestinians and 166 foreign passport holders entered Egypt from Gaza on Monday, Health Ministry Spokesperson Hossam Abdel Ghaffar said.

“All cases receive superior medical care from the medical teams present at the Rafah crossing or inside hospitals,” he said.

This decision was taken after the closure of the Rafah border on Saturday suspending the entry of both wounded Palestinians and foreign nationals, which took place after Israel targeted an ambulance evacuating injured Gazans to Egypt.

The border had been closed since the onset of the war, but was briefly opened for two days last week, during which 49 wounded Palestinians and their families were allowed into North Sinai for treatment at hospitals in the governorate and hundreds of foreign nationals exited the strip.