UN warns of food crisis and says quarter of dead are civilians

CIVILIANS make up about a quarter of the 400-plus people who have died in Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip, UN officials said yesterday as the Israel-Hamas war entered its second week.

"Our best estimate is that 25 per cent (of the fatalities] were civilians, of whom a not insignificant number were women and children," said Maxwell Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the West Bank and Gaza. He added that there were people buried beneath rubble, so it would take some days before there was a more precise figure.

Four Israelis have been killed by Hamas rocket attacks.

Mr Gaylard said Gaza's population was suffering a "critical emergency" and a "humanitarian crisis" even though Israel has allowed trucks of food and medicine into the battered coastal enclave. Thousands of houses throughout Gaza have suffered extensive damage from the bombardments, according to the UN.

"It is true that supplies, food and medicine have been going in more than in previous weeks," he said. "At the same time there are critical gaps. We need the violence to stop."

Gaza's 1.5 million residents faced a food crisis because insufficient amounts of wheat were entering, he said, urging Israel to reopen the Karni crossing, which has a conveyor belt that can send in the grain.

Gazans were going 16 hours a day without electricity since the plant supplying most of their power had been without fuel since the bombardment started, Mr Gaylard said. Damage to 15 transformers had left 250,000 people in central and northern Gaza with no electricity supply at all, said the UN.

Mr Gaylard said that while medicine had been entering Gaza, hospitals and clinics were "absolutely overwhelmed" by the estimated 2,000 injured from Israeli aerial bombardments. "These hospitals were already struggling to perform," he added. "An already badly stretched system is now at a critical stage."

Andy Ben-David, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said Israel was allowing 50 to 100 trucks of food, medical equipment and medicine into Gaza each day.

He added: "The majority of the dead are Hamas terrorists or combatants. We have no quarrel with civilians."

Israel has been warning residents to evacuate targeted houses of Hamas leaders, according to the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "In some cases the strike occurred only five minutes after the call," it said, adding that 45 Hamas leaders' houses had been targeted.