International efforts to get Israel to halt or delay plans for a ground assault on Gaza expanded Wednesday, along with calls for a cease fire or a broad expansion of aid deliveries to Gazans. The Israeli government pushed back, blasting leaders at the United Nations and in Turkey for statements that Israel said condoned Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
On the ground in Gaza, the impact of Israel’s retaliatory air assault worsened: Thousands living in communities pocked with missile craters and collapsed residences resorted to sleeping in the streets, hospitals reported closing for lack of electricity and supplies, and the unconfirmed death toll announced by the Gaza health ministry, which is run by Hamas, soared by another 756 Wednesday, to a total of 6,546.
Despite earlier warnings from Israeli forces for Gazans to evacuate from the north to the south, almost two-thirds of this week’s casualties occurred in the southern part of the Strip, the Gaza health ministry said.
In Israel, authorities said they have now identified 1,106 of the Israelis killed in the Hamas attack, including 798 civilians and 308 soldiers. Israeli police announced that about 15 percent of the bodies of murdered civilians remain unidentified.
In a televised address to Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his war cabinet is in unanimous support of an impending ground incursion: “I won’t specify when, how, how many … And that’s the way it is supposed to be … so that we protect our soldiers’ lives.”
In Gaza, the United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees said that nearly 600,000 displaced people are now staying in 150 U.N. facilities, most of them schools. Conditions at those shelters are dire, the relief agency said, with little or no fuel and growing overcrowding. The U.N. agency also said that 38 of its workers have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began.
In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry — an official agency of the Palestinian Authority — declared “the collapse of the health care system in Gaza” and issued a strongly-worded plea for the international community to “intervene immediately” to allow medical aid, food and volunteer health workers to flow into the blockaded enclave.
“From today onward, all injured individuals, including children, women and the elderly in Gaza Strip will not be treated due to shortages of medicines and consumables,” the statement said. The ministry said 12 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are “no longer functioning.” At the open hospitals, physicians are treating patients on floors and corridors and surgeries are proceeding without anesthetics and under portable lights.
Only about 30 percent of the Gaza medical staffers who worked at hospitals and clinics before the war are still on duty, either because they’ve had to flee their homes or because they fear moving around the Strip, said Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry.
Doctors and nurses told The Washington Post that they are working nearly 24-hour shifts and have not returned home for days or weeks.
A medical staffer at al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, said that a nurse on his team left the hospital for the first time since the conflict began. “She started crying and sobbing and screaming” after she learned that her “house was bombed and leveled to the ground,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his security. The nurse hurried home to find out what had happened to her family. “Heartbreak after heartbreak,” the staffer said.
Many health facilities have turned into improvised camps for displaced Gazans, who are seeking safety in medical compounds, further straining dwindling water, food and power supplies.
“We are looking at a real humanitarian catastrophe, not just in the making, but now fully arrived,” said William Schomburg, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s mission in Gaza. On a recent visit to Gaza City’s al-Quds hospital, airstrikes shook the walls and there was palpable fear among the exhausted medical staff, he recalled. He said he saw displaced Palestinians sleeping “on every inch of spare floor space, because no one feels safe outside.”
Schomburg said the Red Cross has trauma surgeons waiting to enter Gaza, “but we need security.”
France is sending a hospital ship “to support the Gazan hospitals,” French President Emmanuel Macron announced Wednesday during his visit with the Egyptian president in Cairo. Britain said it sent a planeload of aid for Gaza residents to Egypt.
International support for Israel seemed to fray, even as American and European leaders continued to say that the Jewish state has the right to defend itself.
Israeli officials erupted in outrage over comments by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who condemned Hamas but also called for a cease-fire and decried “collective punishment” of Palestinians. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Guterres said “The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the horrific attacks by Hamas. Those horrendous attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
Guterres said the attack on Israel “didn’t happen in a vacuum,” to which Israeli government minister Benny Gantz, a former military chief of staff, replied that Guterres is a “terrorism apologist,” saying that “days when the U.N. Secretary General supports terrorism are dark days for the world.”
After calling for Gutteres’s resignation, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, told Israeli media Wednesday that “we will refuse visas to U.N. representatives. … It’s time to teach them a lesson.”
Erdan said U.N. officials have presented “a false picture” of conditions in Gaza and that “everyone knows” the U.N. agencies in Gaza are controlled by Hamas. He said a next step should be to expel “hostile U.N. officials” from Israel.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday went beyond Guterres’s rhetoric. In a fiery speech to legislators from his party, Erdogan condemned Israel, defended Hamas and called for international pressure for cease-fire.
“Hamas is not a terrorist organization but a liberation group, a group of mujahideen that is fighting to protect its soil and its citizens,” Erdogan said. Addressing Israel, he said “Turkey owes you nothing.” His audience greeted that line with a standing ovation.
And Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, speaking in Qatar, said an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza would be a massacre. He said countries that support Israel’s actions are “accomplices to its crimes.”
Israel’s foreign ministry issued a sharp retort to Erdogan: “Israel rejects with horror the Turkish president’s grave words about the terrorist organization Hamas. Hamas is an abominable terrorist organization, worse than ISIS, that brutally and intentionally murders babies, children, women and the elderly, takes civilians hostage and uses its own people as human shields.”
“Erdogan supports terror, period,” said Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar. “It’s time we recalibrate the course of our relations with Turkey.”
Turkey, a NATO member and one of the first Muslim-majority countries to open diplomatic relations with Israel, had been rebuilding ties, which had been strained in recent years — until this war began.
Erdogan described Israel’s airstrikes against Hamas as “not self-defense, but deliberate brutality aimed at committing crimes against humanity.” He called for pressure on Israel for a cease-fire and proposed an “International Palestine-Israel Peace Conference.”
But the growing calls for a cease-fire won little support from Washington and some of its European allies. The Biden administration has said a formal cease-fire would help Hamas. A spokesman for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed Wednesday, saying that cessation of the retaliatory attacks “would only serve to benefit Hamas,” but adding that “humanitarian pauses, which are temporary, which are limited in scope, can be an operational tool.” And foreign ministers from Australia, Canada and New Zealand added their support for a humanitarian pause in rocket fire from Hamas and airstrikes by Israel to allow aid to reach Gazans.
Czech prime minister Petr Fiala, after meeting with Netanyahu Wednesday, said “Israel has an absolute right to defend itself. Terrorists still have more than 200 hostages …. Hamas is our common enemy. We must ensure that it is isolated.”
In his television address, Netanyahu said questions about why Israel was so completely surprised by the Hamas attack will be addressed after the war is over. “October 7 was a black day in our history,” he said. “Everyone will have to give answers on the debacle — including myself — but all that will happen only after the war.”
In Gaza, where only three small aid convoys have arrived since Israel announced a “complete siege,” Israel’s exclusion of fuel from the list of materials that are being allowed into the Strip has led to failures of backup generators that are used to pump water, operate ambulances and keep the lights on.
At al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza, a spokesman, Mohamed al-Haj, told The Post that the facility will run out of fuel within two days. Doctors are using solar power to attend to the most critical needs, such as newborns in neonatal intensive care, dialysis patients and lifesaving surgeries. But at night, the solar power cuts out.
A 52-year-old teacher who lives nearby said she has only intermittent access to electricity, internet, clean water and cooking gas.
“No one here asks how you are,” the educator said by phone, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her safety. “We just communicate when we hear bombings and we try to estimate where it is.”
Several explosions could be heard during the spotty phone conversation. “We are just trying to survive,” she said.
Fisher reported from Washington. Karen DeYoung and Louisa Loveluck in Washington contributed to this report.
