From the Liveblog of
Friday, November 10, 2023
UN says 50,000 Gazans fled through corridor set up by IDF, municipal wells shut down
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
Fifty thousand Palestinians have fled from northern to southern Gaza through the humanitarian corridors set up by Israel, the UN Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says.
The evacuation was enabled thanks to a formalized humanitarian pause in the fighting that the IDF implemented in several neighborhoods in northern Gaza for the first time following pressure from the Biden administration.
It was the sixth consecutive day in which the IDF allowed civilians to evacuate south through the Salah a Din humanitarian corridor, with 50,000 evacuating over the course of seven hours.
“Hundreds of thousands of people remaining in the north [of Gaza] are struggling to secure the minimum amounts of water and food to survive,” OCHA says in its daily update.
The UN office says just 65 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza on Thursday after two days in a row in which the number was closer to the initial US goal of 100. OCHA called Thursday’s figure “wholly inadequate.”
An unconfirmed number of foreign nationals evacuated Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah crossing along with a handful of wounded people who will be treated on the other side of the border, OCHA says.
Thursday saw all municipal water wells shut down due to lack of fuel, after several days of limited operation, OCHA adds. As a result, the trucking and pumping of brackish water for non-drinking domestic uses came to a halt.
One of the two desalination plants in southern Gaza also shut down due to a lack of fuel, while the other operated at roughly five percent capacity.
As of Thursday, no bakeries were active, due to the lack of fuel, water and wheat flour as well as the damage sustained by many in the fighting, OCHA says.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says that the death toll in Gaza climbed to 10,818, though that figure cannot be verified and is believed to include civilians killed by errant Palestinian rockets as well as combatants killed by Israel.
