Israel's response to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas is producing equal death and destruction in the Gaza Strip. In both cases, the victims are innocent civilians. Reports arriving from Palestine describe a further deterioration of the humanitarian crisis that has long affected more than two million people.

Médecins Sans Frontières: "Catastrophic situation in Gaza, hospitals and ambulances bombed"

"In Gaza, following the relentless bombardments and air strikes, the situation is catastrophic and hospitals are overwhelmed by the high number of wounded," explains Médecins Sans Frontières, whose workers "continue to work tirelessly to treat injured people and donate medical supplies. As well as being active at Al-Awda hospital, where on Monday alone fifty people arrived following the attack on the Jabalya camp, we have set up a clinic in the centre of Gaza and have sent surgical teams to two hospitals."

"In just three days," recounts Léo Cans, MSF's head of mission in Palestine, "we used up three weeks' worth of medical supplies. Yesterday morning we received at our hospital a 13-year-old boy whose body was almost completely burned after a bomb fell near his home and started a fire. It is very difficult to treat cases like these in the conditions in which we are operating, and when children are involved it is very hard to accept."

"Collective punishment of an entire people is unacceptable"

Israeli raids on Gaza have struck residential buildings, schools, refugee camps, hospitals and ambulances. Among the targets, the Indonesian Hospital was damaged; an ambulance carrying a wounded person was destroyed in front of the medical facility, and three others were hit.

Gaza is running short of water, electricity and fuel, and some hospitals — whose operations depend on generators — have enough resources for only a few days. "Medical facilities must be respected and on this there can be no negotiation. This conflict must not, in any way, lead to the collective punishment of the population of Gaza. Cutting off supplies of water, electricity and fuel is unacceptable," concludes Cans.

ActionAid: "Starving and depriving Palestinians of water is a potential war crime"

Marco De Ponte, secretary general of ActionAid, shares the same view: "Starving and depriving an entire population of water, by cutting off the electricity needed, for example, to purify water, is a potential war crime, even if it will take years to certify the violations on both sides. Punishing an entire population with a medieval siege is unacceptable."

The non-governmental organisation has been present in Gaza for some time: "Our work is purely humanitarian. If there were Israelis in the Strip, we would help them too, of course. What we can say is that the situation for our colleagues on the ground is dramatic, as it is for the rest of the more than 2 million people living there. For a few hours it was possible to cross the southern border and pass into Egypt, but the area of the Rafah crossing has also been bombed. Now the reality is that the Gaza Strip is a cage in which Palestinians are trapped, with no way out. And yet we note that the news coverage in Italy today is very one-sided, unilateral. It is not like that elsewhere in the world."

The Gaza Strip: a cage subjected to a "medieval siege"

For this reason, according to De Ponte, "as we have long been explaining, the state of Israel, as the occupying power, must respect what is set out in the Geneva Convention. And it must also respect international regulations in its response to Hamas. Finally, to seek a resolution to the conflict there is only one path: de-escalation."

Emergency: "Hamas's attack was bestial, but cutting off water and food is a war crime"

In a statement, Emergency stressed that "the brutal and indiscriminate attack house by house, in the streets, at a concert, targeting innocent people whose only fault was their nationality, is a war crime that takes one's breath away for its brutality and for the consequences it will have across the entire Middle East. Nothing can justify it. Cutting off water, food and electricity — means indispensable for survival — from two million people who have already for decades been subjected to a daily and systematic violation of the most basic human rights, as a response to that attack, is also a war crime."

"During his tenure," the Italian non-governmental organisation continues, "Netanyahu has pursued a foreign policy that has systematically ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians, as written by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The international community too has for years ignored the living conditions of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, abandoning them to their own devices from a humanitarian standpoint, but above all politically."

Amnesty International: "All hostages must be freed. Embargo on Gaza is apartheid"

The uniformity of responses from humanitarian organisations is confirmed also by the position of Amnesty International, according to which "a new cycle of extreme violence began on Saturday, in Israel, in Gaza and in the West Bank. The initial toll for civilians is tragic and our thoughts go to all the victims. We call on the international community to exert pressure on the parties to respect humanitarian law."

Amnesty specified that "deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, conducting disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians, is a war crime. The kidnapping of civilians held hostage by Hamas constitutes a violation of international law and a war crime. We demand the unconditional release of all civilians," explained secretary general Agnès Callamard. The organisation also recalled that "the embargo on Gaza is set within a context of apartheid."

Volker Turk of OHCHR: "Total siege endangers the lives of civilians"

The United Nations has also firmly condemned the actions of Hamas, and equally Israel's response: "Imposing a total siege endangers the lives of civilians, depriving them of goods essential for survival," stressed Volker Turk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

UNRWA ✓ @UNRWA

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🔺Last night, @UNRWA HQ compound in the📍#GazaStrip sustained significant damage as a result of airstrikes nearby.

🔺Collateral and direct damage has been recorded to at least 18 @UNRWA facilities including schools sheltering displaced civilians ⬇️
unrwa.org/newsroom/offic…

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For its part, the World Health Organization called for a cessation of hostilities "that are causing unprecedented suffering in Israel and in the Gaza Strip, where hospitals are operating on emergency generators that will be unusable within a matter of days." The WHO also expressed "grave concern for the health and conditions of the hostages, including civilians, abducted by Hamas on 7 October."

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (Unrwa), approximately 200,000 people have taken shelter in schools. But at least two of these have already been struck by Israeli airstrikes, as clarified by the humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, Canadian Lynn Hastings. Similarly, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) has explained that the number of displaced people is the highest since the 50-day hostilities in 2014, which were the most serious ever recorded in Gaza since 1967.

Lynn Hastings @LynnHastings

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Read my statement about on the hostilities between Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip and Israel, below.

As the security and humanitarian situations continue to escalate, all parties must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law.

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Why humanity must be rediscovered in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel

In the stretch of territory enclosed between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, humanity has been lost for far too long. It was lost by those who perpetrated the barbaric massacre at dawn on Saturday that cost the lives of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians. It was lost by those who created in the Gaza Strip a situation comparable to that of an immense open-air prison/ghetto. It was lost by the international community, which for years allowed the two parties involved to "settle" the matter between themselves, with opposing extremisms often prevailing. It is being lost today by those who react, on both sides, by promising arms supplies rather than diplomacy. It is lost by those who engage in dangerous acts of political balancing in order to assign different weight, different gravity, to the killers of innocent Palestinians and Israelis.

History can never justify the savage violence of Hamas, just as it can never justify the "total siege" of civilians in Gaza or the existence of forms of apartheid in the West Bank. Until this is plain to all in Tel Aviv, in Ramallah, and equally in Washington, London, Tehran or Cairo, the foundations will continue to be lacking for any form of dialogue that might genuinely lead to peaceful coexistence.