Gaza residents raid food warehouses as ‘civil order’ disintegrates, UN says

Thousands of people in Gaza pillaged wheat, flour and other food supplies from United Nations warehouses, a U.N. agency said on Sunday, warning that “civil order” was starting to disintegrate in the besieged enclave.

Israeli military forces expanded their ground operations in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that the war with the Hamas militant group was entering a “second stage.”

Israeli warplanes conducted airstrikes early Sunday near the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, in northern Gaza, residents said, after Israel claimed Hamas has a command post under the facility, the Associated Press reported.

Israel says most residents in Gaza have heeded its orders to flee to the south, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north.

According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), a local humanitarian organization, the Israeli military on Sunday morning issued a warning regarding another hospital, calling on the NGO to “immediately evacuate Al-Quds Hospital in the Gaza Strip, as it is going to be bombarded.” There have been “raids 50 meters away from the hospital,” PRCS wrote on X.

The Al-Quds Hospital, also in northern Gaza, had already received a similar notice since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but Palestinians say the facility cannot be evacuated as it hosts an intensive-care unit and children in incubators, as well as many displaced Palestinians.

The Israeli forces have so far refrained from directly hitting the hospital after Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a doctors’ group, said it filed a petition with Israel’s Supreme Court claiming that Al-Quds hospital could not be evacuated.

Israeli warplanes attacked more than 450 Hamas targets overnight, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, while more troops entered Gaza. Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip since the October 7 Hamas attacks that killed 1,400 people and saw 230 people taken as hostages.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday defended Israel’s campaign against Hamas amid mounting criticism of the Israeli military’s siege of Gaza. “What a lot of people are calling for is just a stop to Israeli military action against terrorists period. Just stop, no more, Israel cannot go after terrorists who conducted this largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” Sullivan said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “We have taken the position that Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorist attacks,” he said.

Sullivan said the U.S. sees “an elevated risk of this conflict spreading to other parts of the region. We are doing everything in our power to deter and prevent that,” he added.

NGO Save the Children has warned that a million children in Gaza could die as a result of the Israeli bombing, and from prolonged power shortages and the lack of critical medical supplies.

Israeli airstrikes were reportedly carried out earlier in the vicinity of the Shifa Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital, also in northern Gaza. The Israeli military had no immediate comment when asked about reports of strikes near Shifa, the AP reported.

The U.N. General Assembly on Friday adopted a resolution calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.” The Israeli government dismissed the U.N. resolution, saying Israel will continue to defend itself. “Israel will do what must be done to eradicate Hamas’ capabilities,” said Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N.

Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, killing over 1,400 people. Israel has retaliated with daily airstrikes on the blockaded Palestinian enclave, killing an estimated 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.