Israel’s month-long escalated assault and ethnic cleansing campaign in north Gaza has created conditions horrific “beyond imagination,” a UN humanitarian official has warned as the region enters its second month without receiving any food aid.
Amid a visit to north Gaza, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory Muhannad Hadi said on Tuesday that Israel’s assault has created conditions not fit for survival.
“This is not a place for humans to survive,” said Hadi. “This must end. This misery must end. This war must end. This is beyond imagination.”
The UN official said that conditions have declined significantly since the Israeli military first escalated its assault in the north a month ago — creating an even more dire situation for the area already stricken by a year of Israel’s famine, disease spread and bombardments.
During his last visit in September, Hadi visited a UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school-turned shelter in Gaza City that was then sheltering 500 people. Now, just weeks later, that school is sheltering over 1,500 people who have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s mass evacuation orders in the region.
“At this school, I have seen families and people living on top of each other. It is unbearable here,” Hadi said. “There is no access to [the] bathroom. There are shortages of food. The situation is unbearable. Sewage water is everywhere. Waste is everywhere.”
Hadi described watching one man preparing lentil soup, made up of just water and lentils, in a small pot that needed to feed 12 people.
Indeed, the UN has reported that “all attempts” by humanitarian groups to deliver food to north Gaza have been blocked for the past month, as Israel has besieged north Gaza. In central and south Gaza, meanwhile, over 100 kitchens are on the brink of shutdown due to a lack of supplies; last month, Israel allowed an average of only 30 trucks a day to enter Gaza, UNRWA reported, representing just 6 percent of the amount of aid that was entering the region before the genocide.
Israel’s bombardments in north Gaza are nonstop, killing dozens each day and burying untold numbers of people under the rubble, never to be seen again.
Norwegian Refugee Council head Jan Egeland also visited north Gaza this week and noted that Palestinians’ suffering is “almost unparalleled anywhere in recent history.”
“The complete destruction I have witnessed this week in Gaza City and other urban areas of northern and central Gaza is worse than anything I could imagine as a long-time aid worker,” Egeland said. “Families torn apart, men and boys detained and separated from their loved ones, and families unable to even bury their dead. Some have gone days without food, drinking water is nowhere to be found.”
Conditions are only slated to get worse. The Israeli military announced this week that it is moving into a phase of its north Gaza campaign where they will treat any person in the northernmost part of the Strip as a combatant — meaning they can be killed with impunity — despite no evidence backing the military’s claim that the area is empty of civilians.
This is essentially an open death threat to the roughly 100,000 Palestinians left in north Gaza, as the Israeli military appears to be working toward a goal to annex and occupy the region.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.