"What Israel is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime,' former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert has said, even as Israeli forces killed at least 42 Palestinians across Gaza since Wednesday morning.
The Benjamin Netanyahu’s government were waging “a war without a purpose – a war without a chance of achieving anything that can save the lives of the hostages.”
A critic of the current Israeli leadership, Olmert told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that nothing but domestic and international political pressure will convince Benjamin Netanyahu to pull back from a renewed offensive in Gaza.
Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009 said that the “obvious appearance” of the campaign was that Israel was killing many Palestinians, and that “from every point of view, this is obnoxious and outrageous.”
Thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of imminent death after a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade on the besieged enclave, which has spread famine, the United Nations relief chief warned.
That has put 14,000 babies at risk of dying in the next 48 hours, Tom Fletcher said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday.
According to the emergency coordinator in Gaza for the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, the medical supplies are "critically low." "There is a small amount of aid that is inside, but it hasn't reached the communities at all," she said, adding Israeli officials are placing conditions on how it is distributed which are "not safe".
Meanwhile, homes and hospitals are "being targeted" and "the access to healthcare and to any kind of assistance is becoming impossible", she said.
The condition of people there is "deteriorating", and the number of children coming in with third-degree burns is "horrific". The "agony" of children without pain medication, people on the streets "desperate for food", and mothers "watching their children starve", are things that are "getting worse every day", she added.