Some 400,000 people have been displaced after Israel resumed strikes on Gaza, according to humanitarian organisations. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported on social network X on Friday.
UNRWA reiterated its call for the resumption of the ceasefire, the release of all hostages and the unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid.
The UN on Friday said its analysis of 36 recent Israeli strikes on Gaza showed that only women and children were killed, and condemned the human cost of the war.
The UN human rights office also warned that Israel’s increasingly frequent evacuation orders were leading to the “forced displacement” of people into ever-shrinking areas of war-torn Palestinian territory.
“Between March 18 and April 9, 2025, there were some 224 incidents of Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for internally displaced people,” spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
“In some 36 strikes about which the UN Human Rights Office corroborated information, the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children. Overall, a large percentage of fatalities are children and women, according to information recorded by our Office,”she added.
She stressed that even areas where Palestinians had been instructed to go in accordance with a growing number of Israeli “evacuation orders” were being attacked.
“Despite Israeli military orders instructing civilians to relocate to the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis, strikes continued on tents in that area housing displaced people, with at least 23 such incidents recorded by the Office since March 18,” she said.
UN asks to let aid into Gaza
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Israel must allow unimpeded access for humanitarian aid that is stuck at crossings into the Gaza Strip.
Guterres recalled the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The document states that “the occupying power has the duty to ensure and maintain, with the assistance of national and local authorities, by all means at its disposal, sanitary and hospital facilities and services, public health and public hygiene in the occupied territory, in particular by adopting and applying the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”
On March 2, Israel suspended the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave and closed all crossing points.
