‘Promises of safe areas are empty,’ Doctors Without Borders says after Israeli shelling of aid shelter kills 2
The “promises of safe areas are empty,” and Israeli forces are not ensuring civilian safety in Gaza after two people were killed at its shelter in Khan Younis last night, the general director of Médecins Sans Frontières said.
According to the group, also known as Doctors Without Borders, an Israeli tank shell hit a known and clearly marked shelter where its aid workers and their families were housed in Al-Mawasi. The 64 people inside were not given an evacuation order and Israeli forces were “regularly informed” about the MSF team’s location, the organization said.
“The amount of force being used in a densely populated urban area is staggering, and targeting a building knowing it is full of humanitarian workers and their families is unconscionable,” MSF general director Meinie Nicolai, said in a statement.
A staff member’s wife and daughter-in-law where killed in the hit to the building, and shelling in the area delayed ambulances for the injured for two hours, according to MSF.
“We are outraged and deeply saddened by these killings,” Nicolai said. “On the same day the United States chose to veto an immediate ceasefire, two daughters saw their mother and sister-in-law killed by an Israeli tank shell.”
The IDF declined to comment to NBC News on the matter, and the aid organization said it has contacted Israeli authorities seeking an explanation.
MSF worker who left Gaza days ago calls hit on colleagues’ shelter incomprehensible
Karin Huster finished her mission in Rafah days before one of the homes sheltering Médecins Sans Frontières staffers was hit, killing two of her colleagues’ family members and injuring several others.
“It’s just questioning whether we ever were safe even in our house?” Huster told NBC News in a call today.
The building that was hit was only a few minutes down the road from where Huster stayed during her five-week mission in Rafah, during which she helped coordinate the medical infrastructure for the organization. MSF said yesterday the shelter was shelled during an operation by Israeli forces, killing two people and injuring eight others.
“It’s incomprehension,” Huster said. “Obviously, it’s anger, right, because our colleagues lost you know, a wife, daughter-in-law, five of their family members were injured. I mean… you know, it’s beyond angry actually.”
Huster spent five weeks in Rafah and saw many of the more than 1 million displaced Gazans either moving back to central Gaza or to the west to set up their tents of plastic sheeting on the beach.
Although Israel has not yet launched a ground assault on the border city, there were “strikes all the time.” Despite the constant bombardment, which at one point Huster described as “hell on earth,” she told NBC News that she was sure to return for another mission in Gaza.
“I mean, if we don’t then who goes, right?”
In call for cease-fire, WHO chief calls Gaza a ‘death zone’
The chief of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, called the crisis in Gaza “inhumane” and again called for a cease-fire in the region.
“The health and humanitarian situation in Gaza is inhumane and continues to deteriorate,” Tedros said at a media briefing today.
“We need a cease-fire now. We need hostages to be released. We need the bombs to stop dropping, and we need unfettered humanitarian access. Humanity must prevail,” he said.
Ghebreyesu called the Gaza Strip a “death zone.”
“More than 29,000 people are dead; many more are missing, presumed dead; and many, many more are injured,” he said.
Harvard condemns student and faculty groups for posting antisemitic cartoon
BOSTON— Harvard University condemned what it called a “flagrantly antisemitic cartoon” that an undergraduate group posted on social media over the weekend. It also appeared on the Instagram account of Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
Copied from a newsletter published by students in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the image features a Black man and an Arab man with nooses around their necks, held by a hand imprinted with the Star of David that has a dollar sign in the middle of the star.
The image was removed and the student and faculty groups apologized, but the post prompted a storm of criticism that Harvard isn’t doing enough to protect its Jewish community.
“Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of…
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