Two senior UN officials described civilian suffering in the Gaza Strip in stark terms at the Security Council on Monday, making urgent appeals for a humanitarian ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas hours after that country’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, forcefully rejected any such possibility.
“The scale of the horror people are experiencing in Gaza is really hard to convey,” Martin Griffiths, the UN’s chief official for humanitarian and relief affairs, said in a statement delivered on his behalf while he remained in West Asia.
“The health care system is in tatters,” he said. “Patients lie on the floors and in corridors. Surgeons are operating without anaesthesia.” Israeli airstrikes have killed thousands and injured tens of thousands, he said. Some 1.4 million of the territory’s more than 2 million residents are displaced, and hundreds of thousands are packing into overcrowded shelters and seeking protection at hospitals already overwhelmed with patients and under Israeli directives to leave, he added.
“There is nowhere safe for these patients to go,” Griffiths said. “For those on life support and babies in incubators, moving would almost certainly be a death sentence.”
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general for the UN Relief and Works Agency, the agency that aids Palestinians, appearing via livestream, expressed deep concern for UN workers’ safety. The agency says more than 60 of its personnel have been killed. Lazzarini called his colleagues and the aid they administered “the only glimmer of hope for the entire Gaza Strip.”
But, he said, referring to a border crossing with Egypt, “The handful of convoys being allowed through Rafah is nothing compared to the needs of over 2 million people trapped in Gaza.” He said that without the “political will to make the flow of supplies meaningful,” his agency was doomed to fail.
The UN has said that 100 trucks a day are needed to meet humanitarian needs in Gaza. Far fewer have entered the territory, despite commitments by Israel to let in a larger number. A spokesperson for UNRWA said that 27 trucks of aid had entered on Monday morning and that 39 more were received at dusk and would formally enter Gaza on Tuesday.