Acting Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya said that urgent action is needed to address the abject conditions and intolerable suffering in Gaza Strip.
“The atrocities in Gaza must end, but this cannot happen through words; it must happen through action – urgent, unequivocal action,” Msuya said Wednesday at a UN Security Council session on “the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.” She reported that, since her last briefing to the Council on 9 October, the people of Gaza have suffered multiple mass casualties due to Israeli air strikes, with nearly 400 Palestinians killed in Gaza and almost 1,500 injured.
“The world has seen the images of patients and displaced persons, sheltering near Al-Aqsa Hospital, burning alive, while others, including women and children, are suffering the excruciating pain of severe life-changing burns,” without any way to get urgent care,” she said.
Detailing other developme
nts in northern Gaza, where Israel’s military offensive is intensifying and Jabaliya is under siege, where 55,000 displaced people are stranded with water and food running out, she reported that, hours before, a strike on a school serving as a shelter in Nuseirat killed more than 20 people. Meanwhile, only 3 of the 10 hospitals in North Gaza Governorate are now operational and only at minimum capacity. In addition, 11,000 pregnant women have no antenatal care. On 12 October, an inter-agency team – from the United Nations, an international, non-governmental organization and the Palestine Red Crescent Society – was finally able to reach the Kamal Adwan and Al-Sahaba hospitals in northern Gaza, “after nine separate attempts where they were denied or impeded by Israeli forces,” she pointed out, stressing that “humanitarian aid cannot be provided in one-off batches”.
Also reporting that no food aid entered northern Gaza from 2 October to 15 October, when a trickle was allowed in, she said: “Given the abject condi
tions and intolerable suffering in north Gaza, the fact that humanitarian access is nearly non-existent is unconscionable.” Less than a third of the 286 humanitarian missions coordinated with Israeli authorities in the first two weeks of October were facilitated without major incidents or delays. “This woeful and unacceptable trend must change,” she stated. However, the second polio campaign began in northern Gaza, with teams from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) vaccinating 43 per cent of children the first day, thus demonstrating the critical role of the Agency.
“The level of suffering in Gaza defies our ability to capture it in words, or even to comprehend its scale,” she said, underscoring that international law must be respected, and the Council must exert all their influence to ensure it.
The wounded and sick must receive the care they need, and hospitals and medical personnel must be protected.
The provisional orders and determinations of the
International Court of Justice must be respected. There must be accountability for international crimes, she stressed.
Source: Kuwait News Agency