Eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Gaza’s hospitals, including rape, torture, mass executions, and soldiers crushing Palestinian bodies with tanks. Hamas says Israel’s systematic attack on hospitals is central to its “war of extermination.”
Israel continued its airstrikes on Rafah, killing four children, while in northern Gaza Israel turned back food aid for the second time in a week and killed at least 7 Palestinian aid-seekers near the Kuwaiti roundabout.
Congress passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill that will continue a ban on funding UNRWA until at least 2025. President Biden has said he will sign the bill immediately.
Netanyahu has vowed to invade Rafah despite the international red line. Meanwhile, the U.S. has sanctioned two illegal settler outposts in the West Bank for the first time.
Israel’s Knesset approved a $19.4 billion budget increase to fund the ongoing Israeli genocide, while the Biden administration has indicated that it will greenlight the targeting of “high-value Hamas targets in and underneath Rafah.”
At least eighteen children have died in Gaza from malnutrition, while deaths by starvation have risen to 23. Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that Biden’s proposed floating pier would take two months and 1000 U.S. troops to build.
Canada will resume funding to UNRWA and pay a pledge of $25m due in April. In Gaza, another Palestinian child dies of thirst and hunger in the north, bringing the number of children to die from malnutrition to 18.
UNRWA’s chief says dismantling the agency is “short-sighted” and will “sow the seeds of hatred, resentment, and future conflict.” Israeli forces fire at Palestinians seeking aid and food in Gaza City and detain others in southern Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s postwar plan would see Israel exerting direct control over a demilitarized Gaza Strip while permanently dismantling UNRWA and assigning “local officials” to govern civilian affairs.