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.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy