The UN flag is no longer enough to protect the 600,000 Palestinians who have found refuge in UN schools in Gaza, a UN official there complained on Friday, citing the deaths of 38 people in these shelters.
• Also read: LIVE | 28th day of the Israel-Hamas war
As the Gaza Strip has been relentlessly shelled by the Israeli army since Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7, more than 600,000 residents of the besieged enclave have found refuge in Gaza Strip Agency facilities, mostly for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). Schools.
“These are people who seek the protection of the UN flag and international humanitarian law,” commented Thomas White, UNRWA’s head of the territory, via video from Gaza.
“The reality is that we cannot even offer them security under the UN flag,” he lamented before UN member states gathered to listen to a briefing on the humanitarian situation.
“More than 50 of our facilities were affected by the conflict, including five directly. I believe that at last count 38 people died in our shelters,” he stressed, fearing that this number would “increase significantly,” especially in the north, where UNRWA no longer has contact with many of these facilities.
Despite everything, the United Nations is “the only hope of the people of Gaza today,” and “I do not want to reach the day when the UN flag will no longer fly in Gaza.”
“Having visited Gaza extensively in recent weeks, it is a landscape of death and destruction,” he stressed, recalling that at least 72 UNRWA staff have been killed since the start of the war.
Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed 9,227 people, including 3,826 children, according to a new report released by Hamas on Friday.
“And God knows how many others still lie uncounted under the rubble,” noted Martin Griffiths, head of the UN Humanitarian Office (Ocha). “The health system is in ruins” and UNRWA “is virtually out of operation.”
In Israel, authorities say at least 1,400 people have been killed since the war began, most of them civilians who were massacred on the day of the Hamas attack, in a scale and violence unseen since Israel’s founding in 1948 . More Over 240 people were taken hostage.
“What we have seen in Israel and the occupied territories over the last 26 days is nothing short of a stain on our collective conscience,” commented Martin Griffiths.