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A senior United Nations official has warned that Gaza risks falling into a humanitarian “tsunami” as a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas ends and Israeli forces resume their offensive on the besieged strip.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said Gaza’s population has been severely reduced and he feared many people would start dying from disease and Israeli bombing of the enclave.
“I am very worried about going into winter after seeing the effects of the siege. . . . After this war, people’s immunity is weakened, their deprivation and Painfully, we may be on the eve of a perfect tsunami of humanitarian disaster. ”
Israel launched its offensive on the Gaza Strip after Hamas launched an attack on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Air and land attacks by Hamas on Hamas-controlled territory since 2007 have killed more than 14,800 people, many of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.
Israel and Hamas last week agreed to a mission to help free hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack and allow more aid into the enclave, which is suffering from severe shortages of food, water, fuel and drug.
But the Israeli military said on Friday it had restarted fighting with Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have repeatedly insisted that they will not deviate from their stated goal of destroying Hamas and eradicating it from Gaza.
Its military chief said that after focusing on northern Gaza, they are now preparing to expand the offensive to southern Gaza, where more than 1 million people have fled.
After Israel launched a ground offensive, it ordered Gazans to leave the north, displacing 1.8 million people. Lazzarini said 80% of the population in the zone is now in the south.
“If you launched an offensive with the same intensity[in the south]. . . one would not only expect a massive redisplacement of the population,” he said. “The concern is that an alarming number of people could be killed, especially with such a dense population density.”
Lazzarini added that health workers have warned of a “significant increase in the emergence of water-borne diseases, hepatitis and skin diseases” due to “insufficient food, lack of access to clean water and increasingly unhygienic conditions”.
The head of UNRWA said he was “shocked and heartbroken” when he visited Gaza last week, describing people who had been forced to leave their homes and take shelter in public buildings and “pleading for the most basic living conditions.”
He said that while visiting a vocational training center where 35,000 people are seeking asylum, he spoke to a family of six who were sleeping on a concrete floor without blankets or mattresses and had lived in the same clothes for 50 years. sky.
“They feel like their dignity has been taken away from them,” Lazzarini said of those forced to live there, explaining that they must queue for hours to use toilets filled with sewage. “The place is overcrowded and the living and sanitary conditions are extremely poor… “Due to overcrowding, they cannot accommodate more people. “
During the week-long pause in hostilities, more aid arrived in Gaza, with at least 200 trucks entering the Strip daily under the agreement. But that’s far fewer than the 500 trucks that entered the enclave every day before the war.
Lazzarini said a resumption of full-scale hostilities “would trigger and accelerate mass deaths.” “You are likely to see more and more people dying from the effects of the siege . . . “They are not going to have to endure weeks and months of complete deprivation again. ”