CNN aired a harrowing report on the Israeli bombing of a refugee camp in Gaza.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry and the Palestine Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian aid organization, 28 people were killed and 54 were injured in Thursday’s strike. The camp, which had been a school, is located in Deir al-Balah.
On Friday’s edition of The Situation Room on CNN, guest host Alex Marquardt cited a U.N. report stating that no food has entered northern Gaza since Oct. 1, “putting one million people at risk of starvation.” Last month, two U.S. government agencies found that Israel is deliberately blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. Yet, in testimony to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that is not happening.
Marquardt prefaced a report from Nic Robertson by stating, “And we want to warn our viewers that some of this footage is disturbing.”
Robertson explained:
Across a hospital floor, a Gazan hellscape. Layan Hamadeen, a 13-year-old girl, has third-degree burns, [and] is in shock. She tells the medic her name, asks for his, then reaches out to hug him, asking, “Will I die?”
“You won’t die. You’ll be fine,” he reassures her.
“What happened?” she asks.
“There is nothing wrong with you,” he says.
“What happened?” she asks again.
“There’s nothing wrong with your body, except a few wounds, and then you’ll heal.”
Layan is one of the lucky ones. A survivor from an Israeli strike Thursday on a school-turned-shelter to thousands, which according to Gazan health officials, killed at least 28 people. This day, those same officials announcing more than 42,000 Palestinians killed since Oct. 7 last year. The IDF said they were targeting a terrorist command and control center at the school compound.
The footage also included an outraged man who railed against Hamas, telling the group, “We don’t want your solutions.”
As CNN aired clips of bodies being unloaded from ambulances, Robertson said, “This death cycle [is] beyond anyone’s wildest nightmare.”
After Robertson’s report aired, he joined Marquardt live from Tel Aviv, Israel.
“U.N. agencies say that hunger is rampant, that the threat of famine persists there,” Robertson said. “They paint a very dire picture that they haven’t been able to get any aid into the north of Gaza since the first of October. So, they paint this picture to give us an understanding of how much aid they’re talking about it. In August, 700 trucks of humanitarian aid went into northern Gaza. In September, it was ramping down – 400 trucks got it. These are large quantities, about 400,000 people there. And now, nothing.”
Robertson added that U.S. officials have been “reminding [Israelis] of their obligations under international humanitarian law in war.”
He noted that as the force on the ground, “they need to make sure that food is getting in, fuel is getting in, water is getting in. Hospitals there right now say they don’t have enough fuel, the ICUs will be shut down, the people in them will die. And all of this, while the war is raging around them.”
Marquardt added, “And we’ve heard time and time again from Israeli officials about everything that they are doing to get that aid in, and that just is not the case in northern Gaza.”
President Joe Biden has repeatedly urged Israeli officials to exercise more restraint in its war in Gaza since Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. Despite reports of some tense phone calls with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has not stopped shipping weapons to the country, which has since opened up another front by invading Lebanon.
Watch above via CNN.
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