Excerpts:
Living conditions for Palestinians in Gaza have reached breaking point, a senior UN official has said.The warning came from Karen Abuzayd, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency.
She said Israeli military action in Gaza over recent weeks was creating suffering and mass despair, rather than any desire for political compromise....
"It would be great to have an international presence, civilian, military, whatever," she said, adding that an international force of peacekeepers could offer Gaza's 1.5m people some protection.
"The strangulation of commerce and trade has ruined the economy, it has brought the institutions of government to a point of near-meltdown and badly shaken the society," she said.
"These pressures and tactics have not resulted in a desire for compromise on the part of the government or the people, or yet the fall of the government, but rather have created mass despair, anger and a sense of hopelessness and abandonment."
...
Between then and the end of August, Israeli security forces killed 226 Palestinians, 54 of them minors, in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Human rights group, B'Tselem has reported.
The group says 114 of these were not taking part in any hostilities when killed, and 46 of them were minors.
In August alone 76 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, 19 of them minors, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than half of those killed were not participating in hostilities at the time, B'Tselem says.
(Source: BBC News, Sept 8/2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5326378.stm)
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