The population of the Gaza Strip, which has been constantly bombarded by the Israeli army for weeks, “has run out of time, run out of options,” emphasized Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations' aid agency for Palestinian refugees, in Geneva on Wednesday.
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“Faced with bombings, deprivation and disease, in an ever-shrinking space, [les Palestiniens] are facing the darkest chapter of their history since 1948 and yet it has been a painful story,” the head of UNRWA added during the World Refugee Forum.
Mr. Lazzarini explains that “Gaza's residents are now crammed into less than a third of the original territory near the Egyptian border.”
He says he saw a truck carrying humanitarian aid stopped by members of the public asking for food and “guzzling it down on the street.”
“It is unrealistic to believe that people will remain resilient in the face of such living conditions, especially when the border is so close,” he added.
The city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, where there is the only open humanitarian crossing for the Gaza Strip, has grown from 280,000 residents to “more than a million people,” Mr. Lazzarini pointed out.
Humanitarian aid in the Palestinian territory largely depends on UNRWA's capacity, “it is now on the verge of collapse,” he stressed. On Tuesday he described the situation as “hell on earth”.
The October 7 attack on Israeli territory by the Islamic movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, left 1,200 dead and 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities, who declared war on Hamas.
Since then, the Israeli army has relentlessly bombed the small, densely populated area and began conducting ground operations in both the north and south, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have moved in the hope of a little respite.
The Gaza Strip is also under an almost complete blockade.
Hamas' health ministry said on Wednesday that the war in Gaza has killed 18,608 people since Israeli airstrikes began on October 7.