U.N. says facilities hit, guesthouse in Gaza raided by Israeli troops

The United Nations said Monday that two of its guesthouses in the central Gaza Strip were either hit or came under attack, including a raid by Israeli troops on a residence for employees of the World Health Organization, as the military moved into an area where at least 50,000 people had been sheltering from the months-long bombardment.

The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement that the agency’s guesthouse in Deir al-Balah was struck three times before Israeli forces entered the premises, separating families and men from women. Men were strip-searched and interrogated at gunpoint, Tedros said, while women were forced to evacuate with their children.

The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the incidents. But an early internal assessment indicated that the attacks on the WHO guesthouse, which began just after noon local time, were from incoming Israeli fire, according to a U.N. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. Even after the U.N. requested that the Israeli military hold its fire so that staff could be evacuated, a quadcopter drone entered the guesthouse and exploded, the official said.

Elsewhere in Deir al-Balah, a hub for U.N. and other aid groups, a guesthouse used by the U.N. Office for Project Services was also hit while there were 13 employees inside, the agency said. Israeli tanks targeted the same location in March, killing a veteran staffer.

Israeli troops near the border with the Gaza Strip on Monday.

The Israeli ground operation in Deir al-Balah puts troops deeper into central Gaza than at any point in the 21 months of war. Israel’s Army Radio reported Monday that troops from the Golani Brigade had entered the city’s southern districts as part of a “targeted” operation to increase pressure on Hamas, after “preliminary” air and artillery strikes.

The military issued displacement orders for much of Deir al-Balah on Sunday, eliminating one of the last areas of Gaza that was not declared a formal combat zone. Now, the majority of Gaza’s 2.1 million people are squeezed into just 12 percent of the territory, according to the U.N., which said the Israeli maneuvers would severely restrict its already limited movement inside Gaza, “choking humanitarian access when it is needed most.”

Palestinians flee Deir al-Balah on Sunday after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders ahead of expected operations in the area.

More than 59,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which began after Hamas militants launched attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage.

The Palestinian enclave is under a near-total Israeli blockade, leaving many residents malnourished and on the verge of starvation. Doctors report that people have started to die of hunger and are fainting from exhaustion in the streets.

The hunger crisis in Gaza has reached “astonishing levels of desperation,” Ross Smith, a senior official with the U.N. World Food Program, said Monday at a news briefing in New York. A third of people are not eating for days in a row, he said, and a quarter of the population lives in famine-like conditions.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 1,000 people have been shot dead by Israeli troops during desperate scrambles for food aid distributed by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The organization’s distribution sites are in or near areas of Gaza controlled by the Israeli military, which says it has opened fire using “warning shots” after troops perceived themselves to be under threat.

A Palestinian mother mourns Sunday after her son was shot dead at a food distribution point in Gaza.

In a statement, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, described the GHF aid program as a “sadistic death trap” and a “massive hunt of people, in total impunity.”

A joint statement Monday from 29 nations, including Britain, Canada and France, urged an immediate end to the war and condemned the killing of civilians seeking aid.

“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement said. “We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

The statement called on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on aid and condemned Hamas for continuing to hold about 50 hostages kidnapped from Israel, about 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

“We condemn their continued detention and call for their immediate and unconditional release,” the statement read. “ … We call on all parties to protect civilians and uphold the obligations of international humanitarian law.”

Palestinians carry sacks of aid unloaded from trucks that had been heading to Gaza City on Sunday.

Israel rejected the statement’s description of its conduct, describing it as “disconnected from reality” and blaming Hamas for the lack of a deal to end the war, saying the armed group was instead “running a campaign to spread lies about Israel.”

Doctors Without Borders said Monday that evacuation orders and fighting in Deir al-Balah had forced 36 of the organization’s Palestinian colleagues to abruptly leave a busy health facility that had been treating an influx of patients from aid distribution sites, in order to evacuate their families.

“This new displacement order has also impacted one of the main lifelines for water distribution in southern Gaza,” it said in a statement. “Today water distribution trucks could not reach the plant, and these orders will put at risk anyone who tries to distribute water from here in the near future.”

Residents said a large number of families had left the area under Israeli evacuation orders. “Tanks have begun moving in the Salah al-Din Street, al-Baraka and al-Laham Street areas,” said Akram Basheer, a resident whose home was in an area outside the military evacuation zone. He said he could hear shelling and that smoke was visible above one of the nearby U.N. warehouses.

Rabiha Salman, 58, said that the fighting had forced her family of nine to flee for the fifth time since the war began. “When they announced the evacuation of the area on Sunday, we didn’t think it could be real, but in the evening, when the shelling became intense, we decided to leave,” she said.

She added: “Our whole life has become displacement and suffering, for almost two years.”

Loveluck reported from London and Balousha from Hamilton, Ontario. Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Siham Shamalakh in Cairo, Abbie Cheeseman in Beirut and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.