UNITED NATIONS, May 17 (APP)::Two truckloads of urgently needed medical supplies have been delivered to Gaza, where scores of Palestinians were killed and wounded when Israeli troops at the border fence with Israel fired at demonstrators protesting the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem.
The drugs and medical equipment delivered by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and partners, include antibiotics, saline solution and syringes to treat an estimated 70,000 people.
Over the past six weeks, Palestinians have been demonstrating against the decade-long blockade on Gaza, but Monday’s protests were the deadliest with nearly 60 killed and more than 1,300 injured.
UNICEF reported that medical facilities there are “buckling under the strain” of dealing with the additional casualties as the health system was already weakened due to shortages of fuel, medicine and equipment.
The agency added that the intensifying violence in Gaza has also worsened the plight of children “whose lives have already been unbearably difficult for many years”.
UNICEF said more than 1,000 children have been injured in violence since the start of the protests, and “many of these injuries are severe and potentially life-altering, including amputations”.
“Children should be protected, not targeted, used in violence or put in risky situations,” said the agency, and called on all actors within the occupied territories “to put in place specific measures to keep children out of harm’s way and avoid child casualties.”
Half of all children depend on humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip, and one in four, need psychosocial care. Families receive four to five hours of electricity each day and 90 per cent have no direct access to clean water.

UNITED NATIONS, May 17 (APP)::A senior Palestinian leader has rebuffed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley for her repeated threats to take down the names of countries that rejected Washington’s demands, saying that she is not “the schoolmarm of the world.”
“She (Haley) threatened and she pressured and she used coercion and so on at the U.N., particularly by taking down names. I don’t think people appointed her the schoolmarm of the world,” Hanan Ashrawi, a top official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said while talking to reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
Ashrawi also voiced her outrage over Ambassador Haley’s walk out from a Security Council on Tuesday meeting when the Palestinian envoy began speaking.
Haley has repeatedly warned other U.N. members that the U.S. would take note of countries that opposed Washington at the U.N.
In December, for example, as the U.N. General Assembly weighed a resolution urging the Trump administration to withdraw its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Haley said the U.S. would “be taking names.”
“On Thursday there’ll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names,” she tweeted on Dec 19.
Ashrawi’s comments came a day after Haley defended Israeli forces who opened fire on Palestinian protesters on the Israel-Gaza border on Monday during a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Sixty Palestinians were killed and 2,700 wounded in what is being described as massacre.
Ashrawi rejected Haley’s claim that the opening of the U.S. embassy was not linked to the Gaza border demonstrations.
“It’s extremely difficult to find any relationship between reality and the words we hear coming out from the American representative here,” Ashrawi said.
Following the United States decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this week and act which she described as “becoming complicit in the occupation,” Ashrawi said Palestinians “want a new multilateral mechanism; we want a new international engagement.”
She said that peace negotiations with Israel since the early 1990s, brokered by the US, had not worked: “The US certainly has joined Israel as a partner in crime. It has joined Israel in violating international law and the resolutions of the Security Council on Jerusalem and so on. So, what we need to do is to bypass these obstacles and to find a sort of global forum for the solution,” she said.
Asked if a two-state solution with both countries living side-by-side in peace, was still possible, Ashrawi said: “This is very much in doubt, it’s very questionable. Unless there is the will to engage, to intervene effectively “ not just to end settlement activities but to begin to dismantle settlements ” Israel will have succeeded in super-imposing Greater Israel on all of historical Palestine.”
Asked for her view on calls from senior UN officials for Hamas in Gaza to stop inciting any violence at the border, she said the militant group was being used as a “convenient scapegoat” to deflect blame and accountability away from Israel.
“It is not Hamas who is responsible for the killing fields that Israel has carried out in Gaza. The people who are on this march to return; these unarmed civilian protests against the moving of the American embassy these are expressions of will by the Palestinian people, who are protesting, demonstrating on their own lands”, she said, adding that “they are sending a message not just to Israel but to the rest of the world that we are a people who are alive and we want to live, and we want our freedom and we want our rights. This is not a sort of incitement or instigation by Hamas.”