Davos:

The Israel-Hamas war has put back development in Gaza by 60 years and mobilising the tens of billions of dollars needed for reconstruction will be an uphill task, the United Nations said.

Around two-thirds of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged, and removing the estimated 42 million tonnes of rubble will be dangerous and complex, the head of the UN Development Programme told AFP.

“Probably between 65 percent to 70 percent of buildings in Gaza have either been entirely destroyed or damaged,” Achim Steiner said in an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos.

“But we’re also talking about an economy that has been destroyed, where we estimate that roughly 60 years of development have been lost in this conflict over 15 months.

“Two million people who are in the Gaza Strip have lost not only their shelter: they’ve lost public infrastructure, sewage treatment systems, freshwater supply systems, public waste management. All of these fundamental infrastructure and service elements simply do not exist.”

And for all these towering numbers, Steiner stressed: “Human desperation is not just something that you capture in statistics.”

‘Years and years’

The fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza war took effect on Sunday.

Steiner said it was difficult to put a timeframe on reconstruction due to the “volatile” nature of the ceasefire, and because the UN’s immediate focus is on life-saving aid.

“When we talk about reconstruction, we are not talking about one or two years here,” he said.

“We are talking about years and years, until you even come close to rebuilding, first of all, the physical infrastructure, but it’s also an entire economy.

“People had savings. People had loans. People had invested in businesses. And all of this is lost. So we are talking about the physical and economic, and in some ways even the psychosocial phase for reconstruction.”

He said the physical reconstruction alone would cost “tens of billions of dollars”, and “we do face an enormous uphill struggle on how to mobilise that scale of finance”.

‘Extraordinary’ destruction

The estimated volume of rubble may yet rise and will leave the reconstruction effort with vast challenges.

“This is not a simple undertaking of just loading it and transporting it somewhere. This rubble is dangerous. There are often still bodies that may not have been recovered. There’s unexploded ordnance, landmines,” Steiner explained.

“One option is recycling. With reconstruction, there is a significant degree to which you can recycle these materials and use them in the reconstruction process,” Steiner said.

“The interim solution will be to move the rubble into temporary dumps and deposits from where it could then later be either taken for permanent processing or disposal.”

In the meantime, if the ceasefire endures and firms up, Steiner said huge amounts of temporary infrastructure would be needed.

“Virtually every school and every hospital has been either severely damaged or destroyed,” he said.

“It’s an extraordinary physical destruction that has happened.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

Israel’s prison service confirmed on Saturday that it had released 200 Palestinian prisoners as part of a Gaza ceasefire deal, which earlier saw Hamas free four Israeli hostages.

“After the conclusion of the necessary activities in the prisons and the approval of political authorities, all the terrorists were released from the Ofer and Ktziot prisons,” the statement said, adding that a total of 200 prisoners had been freed.

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Cairo:

The United Nations chief said Monday the situation in war-torn Gaza was “appalling and apocalyptic”, warning conditions faced by Palestinians in the territory may amount to the “gravest international crimes”.

In remarks read out on his behalf at a Cairo conference aimed at increasing humanitarian aid, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the international community to “build a foundation for sustainable peace in Gaza and across the Middle East”.

The war in Gaza broke out when Palestinian group Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, resulting in 1,208 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 44,429 people in Gaza, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.

Guterres highlighted the devastating toll of the conflict and the urgent need for international action.

“Malnutrition is rampant… Famine is imminent. Meanwhile, the health system has collapsed,” he said.

The UN chief added that Gaza now has “the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world”, with “many losing limbs and undergoing surgeries without even anesthesia”.

The secretary-general also criticised the severe restrictions on aid delivery, calling the current levels “grossly insufficient”.

According to UNRWA’s count, only 65 aid trucks per day had been able to enter Gaza this past month, compared to a pre-war average of 500.

International aid organisations have repeatedly raised alarm over the deteriorating conditions in Gaza, warning that civilians are on the brink of famine.

They have said aid shipments reaching the enclave are now at their lowest since the start of the war.

Israel, which early in the conflict imposed a complete siege for a period on the Hamas-ruled territory, has blamed aid issues on what it says is the inability of relief organisations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.

UN’s Guterres said on Monday that the blockade of aid to Gaza “is not a crisis of logistics” but rather “a crisis of political will and of respect for fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”.

UNRWA said all the attempts it made to deliver aid into northern Gaza had either been “denied” or “impeded” between October 6, 2024 and November 25, amid fierce fighting in the area.

Guterres said UNRWA is an “irreplaceable lifeline for millions of Palestinians”, adding that “if UNRWA is forced to close, the responsibility of replacing its vital services … would rest with Israel”.

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Cairo:

At least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, health officials said, as Israel issued new evacuation orders, citing Hamas rocket fire nearby.

Most of the people killed were from the same family and they included eight children and four women, according to health officials in the Hamas-administered enclave.

Israel’s military said it was aware of the reports of the strike and was looking into them.

“They were asleep in their beds, kids and babies, then three missiles targeted their place,” said Abu Ahmed Hassan, a neighbour. The owner of the house was a known merchant, he said. “There are no military activities here at all,” he added.

Israel’s military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on X on Saturday for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.

He said operatives were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.

Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions. Residents said thousands were streaming out of Maghazi.

On Friday, two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that operatives had been regularly firing rockets from there.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.

“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to about 41 square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” an OCHA report said.

In the central part of the enclave, residents said that Israeli tanks advanced further on Saturday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

The Israeli military said that since Friday its forces had killed dozens of operatives, including some who had fired rockets from central and southern Gaza.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.

CEASEFIRE TALKS PAUSED

Ceasefire talks in Doha, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, paused on Friday with negotiators to meet again next week seeking an agreement to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free remaining hostages.

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday that no party in the Middle East should undermine efforts to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal that he said was now in sight, while at the same time warning that negotiations were “far from over.”

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said in response that reports of an agreement being close were “deceptive claims”.

The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Israel has lost 330 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are fighters.

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Geneva:

Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas operatives rushed across the border into Israeli communities. Israel says the operatives killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged 253 into captivity in Gaza.

This explainer examines how the Palestinian death count is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH COUNT?

In the first months of the war, death counts were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall deaths. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

It also began including deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT COMPREHENSIVE?

The numbers “do not necessarily reflect all victims due to the fact that many victims are still missing under the rubble”, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The Lancet medical journal published a letter from three academics on July 5 estimating that indirect deaths, caused by factors such as disease, might mean the death count is several times higher than official Palestinian estimates.

The letter said it was “not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.

The authors said the figure, which made global headlines, was based on what they said was the conservative estimate of four indirect deaths to one direct death based on trends from prior conflicts.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said during the conflict that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

HOW CREDIBLE IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organisation said the ministry has “good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible”.

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry’s death count figures, while naming the ministry as the source.

Early in the conflict, after U.S. President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the health ministry published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point.

Academics looking at details of listed casualties said in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet medical journal in November that it was implausible that the patterns shown in the list could be the result of fabrication.

However, there are specific questions over the inclusion of 471 people said to have been killed in an Oct. 17 blast at al-Ahli al-Arab hospital in Gaza City. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report estimated that death count “at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum”.

DOES HAMAS CONTROL THE FIGURES?

While Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, the enclave’s Health Ministry also answers to the overall Palestinian Authority ministry in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Gaza’s Hamas-run government has paid the salaries of all those hired in public departments since 2007, including in the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority still pays the salaries of those hired before then.

The extent of Hamas control in Gaza now is difficult to assess with Israeli forces occupying most of the territory, including around locations of major hospitals that provide casualty figures, and with fighting ongoing.

WHAT DOES ISRAEL SAY?

Israeli officials have said the figures are suspect because of Hamas’ control over government in Gaza. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Mamorstein said the numbers were manipulated and “do not reflect the reality on the ground”.

However, Israel’s military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable.

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.

HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED?

The Health Ministry figures do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas combatants, who do not wear formal uniform or carry separate identification.

Israel periodically provides estimates of how many Hamas fighters it believes have been killed. The most recent was Netanyahu’s estimate of 14,000.

Israeli security officials say such estimates are reached through a combination of counting bodies on the battlefield, intercepts of Hamas communications and intelligence assessments of personnel in targets that were destroyed.

Hamas has said Israeli estimates for its losses are exaggerated but has not said how many of its fighters have been killed.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

However, conditions in hospitals compiling figures have worsened amid the fighting and many of those killed may not be identifiable due to their injuries.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Gaza City:

The Israeli army on Wednesday dropped thousand of leaflets on Gaza City urging all residents to leave amid an intensified military offensive on the Palestinian territory’s main city, an AFP journalist said.

The leaflets, addressed to “everyone in Gaza City”, set out routes out of the city to designated safe areas further south and warned the urban area would “remain a dangerous combat zone” as the army hits Hamas targets.

Israel issued a first formal evacuation order for part of the city on June 27, and two more in following days.

In the leaflet drop, the army said residents would be able to take two safe roads “quickly and without inspection from Gaza City to shelters in Deir Al-Balah and Al-Zawiya”.

Following the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israel said in January that it had “dismantled” the group’s “military structure” in the northern city.

Tens of thousands more residents have already fled Gaza City since troops launched the latest offensive in the city’s eastern Shujaiya district and ground battles have since raged.

The two latest orders covered central and western districts where tanks and troops have move in this week.

The army also said its forces had attacked operatives inside Gaza City’s vacated headquarters of the UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA.

Strikes have also hit Deir Al-Balah, an area where Palestinians have been urged to move to for safety.

The United Nations on Tuesday expressed alarm at Israel’s evacuation orders, saying they tell Palestinians to go to zones where there is fighting.

The October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The operatives also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 the military says are dead.

Israel’s military offensive has killed at least 38,243 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures released Tuesday by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Hamas said they informed ceasefire talks mediators that they are ready to reach a “complete agreement” including a comprehensive hostages/prisoners exchange deal if Israel “stops its war and aggression against people in Gaza,” a statement from the group said on Thursday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The Hague:

Judges at the top United Nations court ordered Israel on Friday to halt its military assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in a landmark emergency ruling on South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide.

Reading out the ruling by the International Court of Justice or World Court, the body’s president Nawaf Salam said the situation in the Palestinian enclave had deteriorated since the court last ordered Israel to take steps to improve it. Conditions had been met for a new emergency order.

“The state of Israel shall (….) immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” he said.

The court also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza to allow in humanitarian aid, and said it must provide access to the besieged enclave for investigators and report back on its progress within one month.

The order was adopted by the panel of 15 judges from around the world in a 13-2 vote, opposed only by judges from Uganda and from Israel itself.

It was handed down a week after it was requested by South Africa as part of a case accusing Israel of genocide.

The ICJ is the highest U.N. body for hearing disputes between states. Its rulings are final and binding but have been ignored in the past. The court has no enforcement powers.

Outside, a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved flags and played a rap on a boom box calling for a free Palestine.

Israel has repeatedly dismissed the case’s accusations of genocide as baseless, arguing in court that its operations in Gaza are self-defence and targeted at Hamas operatives who attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

An Israeli government spokesman said on the eve of Friday’s decision that “no power on Earth will stop Israel from protecting its citizens and going after Hamas in Gaza”.

Israel launched its assault on the southern city of Rafah this month, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee a city that had become a refuge to around half of the population’s 2.3 million people.

Rafah, on Gaza’s southern edge, has also been the main route in for aid, and international organisations say the Israeli operation has cut off the enclave and raised the risk of famine.

EMERGENCY MEASURES

South Africa’s lawyers asked the ICJ last week to impose emergency measures, saying Israel’s attacks on Rafah must be stopped to ensure the survival of the Palestinian people.

A decision against Israel could heap more diplomatic pressure on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – a separate court also based in The Hague – announced on Monday he had filed an application for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as leaders of Hamas.

Prosecutor Karim Khan accused Netanyahu and Gallant of crimes including extermination, using hunger as a weapon and deliberately attacking civilians. Israel strongly denied those charges and called on allies to repudiate the court.

South Africa’s wider case at the ICJ accuses Israel of orchestrating a state-led genocide against the Palestinian people. The ICJ has not ruled on the substance of that accusation – this could take years – but has rejected Israel’s demand to throw the case out.

In previous rulings, the court ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide against the Palestinians and allow aid to flow into Gaza, while stopping short of ordering a halt to Israeli military operations.

Israel launched its air and ground war on Gaza after Hamas-led operatives rushed into southern Israeli communities, killing 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. More than 35,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the offensive, Gaza’s health ministry says.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Cairo:

Israeli forces killed at least 50 Palestinians in aerial and ground bombardments across the Gaza Strip on Thursday and battled in close combat with Hamas-led operatives in areas of the southern city of Rafah, health officials and Hamas media said.

Israeli tanks advanced in Rafah’s southeast, edged towards the city’s western district of Yibna and continued to operate in three eastern suburbs, residents said.

“The occupation (Israeli forces) is trying to move further to the west, they are on the edge of Yibna, which is densely populated. They didn’t invade it yet,” one resident said, asking not to be named.

“We hear explosions and we see black smoke coming up from the areas where the army has invaded. It was another very difficult night,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

Simultaneous Israeli assaults on the northern and southern edges of Gaza this month have caused a new exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes, and have cut off the main access routes for aid, raising the risk of famine.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people and led to more than 250 hostages, by Israeli tallies. Since then, Israel’s assault in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 people, with thousands more feared buried under the rubble, according to Gaza health authorities.

HOSTAGES IN RAFAH

Israel says it has no choice but to attack Rafah to root out the last battalions of Hamas fighters it believes are sheltering there.

“Hamas is in Rafah, Hamas has been holding our hostages in Rafah, which is why our forces are maneuvering in Rafah. We’re doing this in a targeted and precise way,” Israeli chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a statement on Thursday.

“We’re protecting Gazan civilians in Rafah from being a layer of protection for Hamas, by encouraging them to temporarily evacuate to humanitarian areas… So far we have eliminated dozens of Hamas terrorists, exposed dozens of terror tunnels and destroyed vast amounts of infrastructure.”

Israeli forces have killed around 180 operatives in Rafah so far, Hagari said in a televised news conference.

UNRWA, the main United Nations agency in Gaza, estimated as of Monday that more than 800,000 people had fled Rafah since Israel began targeting the city in early May, despite international pleas for restraint.

Suze van Meegan, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Emergency Response Leader in Gaza, said many civilians were still stuck.

“The city of Rafah is now comprised of three entirely different worlds: the east is an archetypal war zone, the middle is a ghost town, and the west is a congested mass of people living in deplorable conditions,” she said in a statement.

In parallel, Israeli forces stepped up a ground offensive in Jabalia, where the military has razed several residential areas, and struck nearby Beit Hanoun town, areas where Israel declared major operations over months ago. Israel says it has had to return to prevent Hamas from regrouping there.

Hamas media said 12 Palestinians were killed in an air strike on a store belonging to the welfare ministry east of Deir Al-Balah city in the central Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military said in a statement forces began conducting targeted raids in Beit Hanoun “to eliminate terrorists, locate and strike terror infrastructure, below and above the ground.”

It said its operations had killed Hussein Fiad, the Commander of Hamas’ Beit Hanoun Battalion in an underground area in Jabalia in northern Gaza.

“Fiad was responsible for launching a significant number of the anti-tank missiles that were fired at Israeli territory throughout the war, along with extensive mortar fire toward Israeli communities near the northern Gaza Strip,” it said in a statement.

A senior Hamas security official, Diaa Aldeen Al-Shurafa, was also killed in an Israeli strike as he toured residential districts of Gaza City, the interior ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said.

The Israeli military said three soldiers had been killed in the fighting on Wednesday, raising the number killed since Gaza incursions began on Oct. 20 to 286 soldiers.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

The US military said aid deliveries began Friday via a temporary pier in Gaza aimed at ramping up emergency humanitarian assistance to the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

“Today at approximately 9 a.m. (Gaza time), trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began moving ashore via a temporary pier in Gaza,” the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement, adding that no US troops went ashore.

“This is an ongoing, multinational effort to deliver additional aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza via a maritime corridor that is entirely humanitarian in nature,” it said.

The pier was successfully anchored on Thursday, with around 500 tonnes of aid expected to enter the Palestinian territory in the coming days.

Photos released on Thursday by CENTCOM showed humanitarian aid being lifted onto a barge in the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod.

The Palestinian territory is facing famine after an Israeli siege brought dire shortages of food as well as safe water, medicines and fuel for its 2.4 million people.

The arrival of occasional aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing.

The UN has said that opening up land crossing points and allowing more trucks convoys into Gaza is the only way to stem the spiralling humanitarian crisis.

The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s devastating military retaliation has killed at least 35,272 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)