The US Administration of Joe Biden urged Israel to stop targeting members of the Hamas-run police force who escort humanitarian aid trucks in Gaza, the news website Axios reported on Saturday.
According to Axios, US officials warned that a “total breakdown of law and order” could exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
American officials reportedly said that the US administration is increasingly concerned about the possibility of Gaza becoming “a new Mogadishu” after the “security vacuum and desperation opened the door for armed gangs to attack and loot humanitarian aid trucks.”
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Axios said that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed with his Israeli counterpart last Thursday American concerns, and stressed the need to find a way to provide security for aid trucks entering the Strip.
According to the sources, however, Israel rejected the American request, because “one of its goals in the war is to ensure that Hamas no longer runs the Gaza Strip,” Axios reported.
Last week, nine Palestinian police officers were killed as a result of an Israeli bombing while they were providing humanitarian aid in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
The Associated Press recently reported that the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas had begun redeploying police forces and civil servants near government offices and hospitals in the north and south of the Strip.
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This was interpreted by the agency as evidence of the movement’s steadfastness, despite the air and ground raids launched by Israel against it during the past four months.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 29,692 Palestinians have been killed, and 69,879 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
Moreover, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.
(PC, AJA)
