Britain and 24 Western allies, including Australia, Canada, France and Italy, declared on Monday that the war in Gaza ‘must end now’, arguing that civilians’ suffering had ‘reached new depths’.
‘We urge the parties and the international community to unite in a common effort to bring this terrible conflict to an end, through an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire,’ the grouping added in a joint statement.
‘Further bloodshed serves no purpose. We reaffirm our complete support to the efforts of the US, Qatar and Egypt to achieve this.’
The signatories — which also included Japan, several EU countries, Switzerland and New Zealand — added they were ’prepared to take further action to support an immediate ceasefire’.
The wide-ranging statement branded the controversial Israeli-supported relief effort in Gaza as ‘dangerous’ and said it deprives Gazans of ‘human dignity’.
‘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 said.
‘The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable,’ it added, urging Israel to ‘comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law’.
The statement called for the Israeli government ‘to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively’.
The UN said last week that it had recorded 875 people who had been killed in Gaza while trying to get food via the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
It has replaced UN agencies as the main distributor of aid in the territory.
The 25-nation statement also condemned the continued detention of hostages in Gaza by Hamas militants, demanding ‘their immediate and unconditional release’ and noting a negotiated ceasefire ‘offers the best hope of bringing them home’.
Meanwhile, the signatories said they ‘strongly oppose any steps towards territorial or demographic change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ and said an Israeli plan to shift Palestinians into a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ was unacceptable.
‘Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law,’ they warned.
The statement was also signed by EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management Hadja Lahbib.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency and eyewitnesses reported Israeli shelling in the central city of Deir el-Balah on Monday, after the military warned of imminent action in an area where it had not previously operated.
The Israeli military on Sunday ordered those in the central Gaza area to leave immediately as it was expanding operations, including ‘in an area where it has not operated before’ in more than 21 months of war.
Between 50,000 and 80,000 people were in the area when the evacuation order was issued, according to initial estimates from the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA, with whole families seen carrying what few belongings they had on donkey carts heading south.
On Monday, Deir el-Balah resident Abdullah Abu Saleem, 48, said that ‘during the night, we heard huge and powerful explosions shaking the area as if it were an earthquake’.
He said this was ‘due to artillery shelling in the south-central part of Deir el-Balah and the southeastern area’.
‘We are extremely worried and fearful that the army is planning a ground operation in Deir el-Balah and the central camps where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering,’ he added.
The spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said that ‘we received calls from several families trapped in the Al-Baraka area of Deir el-Balah due to shelling by Israeli tanks’.
‘There are a number of wounded, but no one can reach the area to evacuate them,’ he added.
The Israeli military did not provide immediate comment when contacted by AFP.
Since the start of the war, nearly all of Gaza’s population of more than two million — which is also facing severe food shortages — has been displaced at least once by repeated Israeli evacuation orders.
According to OCHA, the latest order means that 87.8 per cent of Gaza’s area is now under evacuation orders or within Israeli militarised zones.
Hamdi Abu Mughseeb, 50, said that he and his family had fled northwards from their tent south of Deir el-Balah at dawn following a night of intense artillery shelling, which he said was ‘still on-going’.
‘We saw tanks advancing over a kilometre from the southern Khan Yunis direction toward the southeast of Deir el-Balah,’ he said.
‘There is no safe place anywhere in the Gaza Strip. I don’t know where we can go.’
Mai Elawawda, communications officer in Gaza for UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, described the situation as ‘extremely critical’.
‘Shelling is taking place all around our office, and military vehicles are just 400 metres away from our colleagues and their families,’ she said, adding that: ‘Everyone is now evacuating, with most unsure where to go next.’
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed 58,895 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
