“I urge the authorities to respond swiftly to our inquiries, and to investigate these crimes fully,” Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, denouncing “widespread” violations against migrants and refugees. “The loved ones of those who died have every right to know the truth.”
In March, at least 65 migants’ bodies were discovered in a mass grave in southwest Libya, the International Organization for Migration said.The United Nations has protested over the latest mass evacuation orders issued by Israel in Gaza as the army said it had killed dozens of militants in “close-quarters combat” in its latest offensive in Gaza City.
Israel extended its evacuation warning to cover most of Gaza’s main city on Monday and intense fighting erupted.
Gaza City residents reported “explosions and numerous gun battles” and helicopter strikes through the night in southwestern neighbourhoods.
Residents said civilians were still leaving the city and many of the displaced said they had already moved from one evacuation zone only to find their new place of refuge had become a target too.
The UN Human Rights Office said it was “appalled” at new orders to civilians, “many of whom have been forcibly displaced multiple times, to evacuate to areas where IDF military operations are ongoing and where civilians continue to be killed and injured”.
The office said civilians told to head west out of central Gaza City on Monday were caught up in new fighting as the Israeli army “intensified its strikes in the south and west of Gaza City, targeting the very areas where they had instructed people to move to”.
Gaza City residents have now been told to move to the central district of Deir al-Balah, which the UN office said “is already seriously overcrowded with Palestinians displaced from other areas of the Gaza Strip”.
Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, has said Israel’s latest evacuation orders in Gaza City took all of the medical facilities affiliated with the medical charity out of service, Al Jazeera reports.
The directive displaced thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip’s largest city, prompting Hamas to warn of “catastrophic consequences”.
Israel has killed at least 16 Palestinian civilians and injured dozens across Gaza, according to the Wafa news agency.
Seven people have been killed in an Israeli air attack on a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, medical sources told Wafa.
Six others were killed in a house on the al-Jalaa Street near al-Ghafri Junction, in northern Gaza City. An infant was retrieved alive from under the rubble there.
Three others were killed and three more injured in the Lababidi area of northern Gaza City.
A child and a number of injured people were rescued from a bombed house on the al-Nafaq Street in Gaza City.
At least three people have been killed after Israeli aircraft bombed the Freih family home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to Palestinian media outlets, Al Jazeera reports.Many others were injured and some people were still missing, feared under the rubble.
The Israeli military has intercepted what it described as a “suspicious aerial target” approaching southern Israel from the east, Al Jazeera reports.
The object did not enter Israeli territory after being shot down by fighter jets.
Earlier, Al Jazeera reported that Yemen’s Houthis said they had carried out a joint military operation with an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, targeting Israel’s southern port city of Eilat using “a number of drones”.
