A UN employee tells the story of the dire conditions in Gaza.
Last week, the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Assessment Committee (a team of leading international experts on food security, nutrition, and mortality, highly respected in the West) warned that parts of the Gaza Strip were at risk of imminent famine.
The New Yorker reported in an introduction cited above: “Since the war began more than a year ago, aid has been difficult to get into the region. This summer, some progress was made in increasing the amount of food and medicine imported, but in August, those efforts were halted by Israel’s blocking of aid deliveries. Aid agencies and the United Nations stress that the humanitarian emergency is particularly dire in northern Gaza.”
The situation has become so dire that the Biden administration, which has continued to supply weapons to Israel despite the deaths of more than 43,000 people, has again signaled that arms shipments may be cut if humanitarian access is not improved.
The New Yorker added that late last month, the Israeli government passed two laws that would ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israel since late January. The Israeli government has accused UNRWA, which had 13,000 mostly Palestinian employees in Gaza before October 7, of being a “terrorist organization” and infiltrating hundreds of Hamas members, but has offered little evidence to support the claim.
“The past month in northern Gaza was certainly one of the worst phases of the war we’ve seen in the last 13 months,” Louise Wattridge, a senior UNRWA official who has been stationed in Gaza for the past six months, told the New Yorker. Parts of northern Gaza have been besieged and for a month no food has been allowed to enter. All our requests for humanitarian aid have been rejected by the Israeli authorities. The water wells we operate in these areas have either been bombed or run out of fuel or the staff has been forced to flee for their lives and as a result, they are not on-site to access these wells.”
Horrifying apocalyptic scenes
Louise Wattridge added: “We have almost no access to these besieged areas, but we hear from colleagues who are left on the ground that bodies are being left in the streets. We know that three hospitals in these areas have been destroyed. Some hospitals have been attacked. There are reports that some doctors have been detained. We know that there is currently only one surgeon left in the northern Gaza Strip, in fact, we only hear that people are left to fend for themselves.
The scenes our colleagues describe are more horrific than the apocalypse. Residential buildings, hospitals, and schools have been bombed, and many people are trapped in their homes, just taking shelter, their food and water running out.