BRUSSELS: The European Union’s outgoing top diplomat Josep Borrell said Monday he had “no more words” to describe the situation in the Middle East, before chairing his last planned meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers.
“I exhausted the words to explain what’s happening in the Middle East,” Borrell told reporters, barely concealing his frustration at the EU’s failure to weigh on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his five-year mandate, AFP reported.
“There is no more words,” he said. “It’s about 44,000 people killed in Gaza, the whole area is being destroyed, and 70 percent of the people being killed are women or children,” said.
“The most frequent ages of casualties are children below nine years old,” said the 77-year-old foreign policy chief.
Borrell confirmed he would urge ministers Monday to suspend a political dialogue with Israel — part of a wider agreement governing trade ties — over the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Since Israel unleashed its devastating offensive in Gaza in retaliation for the unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, the EU’s member states have been deeply divided over the conflict.
Borrell has often been an outlier in denouncing what he views as Israel’s excesses.
The health ministry in Gaza said on Monday that at least 43,922 people have been killed in more than 13 months of Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territory.
The toll includes 76 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 103,898 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed 18 Palestinians on Monday, including six people who were killed in attacks on tents housing displaced families, medics said.
Four people, two of them children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a tent encampment in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, designated as a humanitarian zone, while two were killed in temporary shelters in the southern city of Rafah and another in drone fire, Gaza’s health officials said as reported by Reuters news agency.
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In Beit Lahiya town in northern Gaza, medics said an Israeli missile struck a house, killing at least two people and wounding several others.
An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City killed five people and wounded 10 others, medics said. Later on Monday, an Israeli air strike killed four people in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, they added.
There has been no Israeli comment on Monday’s incidents, Reuters reported.
Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, said the hospital was under siege by Israeli forces and the World Health Organization had been unable to deliver supplies of food, medicine and surgical equipment.
Cases of malnutrition among children were increasing, he said, and the hospital was operating at a minimal level.
