This Sunday marks 100 days since the devastating war in the Gaza Strip began, killing tens of thousands of civilians – among them more than 10,000 children - and displacing millions of people, following the major attacks that Palestinian armed groups carried out against Israel on October 7 last year. United Nations officials say Palestinians in Gaza are in a state of desperation after three months of being militarily battered and left without sufficient supplies of food, water and medicine.
"The level of desperation of people is palpable and breathable. It is a situation of desperation that you can feel it, that you can really touch it with your hands," said Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
Speaking from Jerusalem to journalists in Geneva on Friday, De Domenico said hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are crammed into ever smaller spaces and forced to set up makeshift shelters in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, with no toilets or basic amenities.
"There is no public service. There is a lack of shelter, a lack of water, a lack of food, and a lack of health. … This high pressure is turning more and more into increasing tension vis-à-vis the UN and vis-à-vis the humanitarian community, who are unable to address their basic needs," De Domenico said.
"[The desperate Palestinians in Gaza] are not aggressive so far, but this tension will increase if we do not scale up our operations," he said, noting that when supply trucks cross the border into Gaza, Palestinians go to the trucks, thank the UN for coming and then "take whatever they can for them and their families to survive."
The OCHA representative said his team has told him that "the faces of the people who are coming to the trucks … are clearly the faces of people who are starving."
Sunday marks 100 days since Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched their attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people, Israeli and foreign nationals, were killed and around 240 hostages taken, among them children.
The brutal assault unleashed a merciless response by Israel's military, resulting in the deaths of more than 23,700 Palestinians, some 70 percent of them women and children, the wounding of more than 60,000 others, and the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, schools, places of worship, and UN facilities.
"As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has repeatedly urged, there must be an immediate cease-fire on human rights and humanitarian grounds," said Türk's spokeswoman, Liz Throssell Friday.
“On the conduct of hostilities, we have repeatedly highlighted Israel’s recurring failures to uphold the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law: distinction, proportionality, and precautions in carrying out attacks. The High Commissioner has stressed that breaches of these obligations risk exposure to liability for war crimes, and has also warned of the risks of other atrocity crimes,” Throssell said.
It is more urgent than ever that there be "a cease-fire to end the appalling suffering and loss of life, and to allow the prompt and effective delivery of humanitarian aid to a population facing shocking levels of hunger and disease," she said, adding that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) "must take immediate measures to protect civilians fully in line with Israel's obligation under international law."
The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) echoed this plea for an immediate and long-lasting cease-fire, stressing that this "is the only way to end the killing and injuring of children and their families and enable the urgent delivery of desperately needed aid."
Speaking from Jerusalem, Lucia Elmi, UNICEF's special representative in the Palestinian territories, warned Friday that conditions in the Gaza Strip — especially for children — continue to deteriorate rapidly.
"Children in Gaza are running out of time, while most of the lifesaving humanitarian aid they desperately need remains stranded between insufficient access corridors and protracted layers of inspections," she said. "Thousands of children have already died and thousands more will quickly follow" if the problems of conflict, disease and malnutrition are not quickly addressed, she added.
More than 10,000 children have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in Gaza in 100 days of violence. Thousands of other children have been reported missing and may be still trapped dead or alive under the rubble.
An estimated 50,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, are in desperate need of prenatal and postnatal care. 350,000 people have non-communicable diseases and need access to medical care. There are overall 155,000 pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers, as well as more than 135,000 children under two in the Gaza Strip with high vulnerability.
By way of illustration, Elmi noted that in the past two weeks, the number of diarrhea cases among children under five has almost doubled from 40,000 to 70,000. The conflict, along with the increased burden of disease and the increasing severity of malnutrition, is putting at risk over 135,000 children of severe acute malnutrition (SAM).
"The combination of these three problems plus the lack of water and sanitation in terms of malnutrition is one of the key concerns at the moment," she said.
Also on Friday, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC) Martin Griffiths briefed the UN Security Council on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, noting that a staggering 85 percent of the total population of Gaza — 1.9 million civilians — have been forcibly displaced amid Israel’s military operations.
Griffiths, who is also Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and head of OCHA, painted a grim picture of the horrific situation in Gaza: Shelters are overflowing, food and water running out, the risk of famine growing by the day and the health system collapsing, with winter “exacerbating the struggle to survive”.
The entire population of the Gaza Strip - more than 2.2 million people - is affected by acute hunger and is at immediate risk of famine. The bombardment, ground operations and siege of the entire population, combined with the restriction of humanitarian access, have led to catastrophic acute food insecurity, increasing the risk of famine every day. At least 500,000 people are already affected by catastrophic conditions.
Describing as “deplorable” that facilities critical to the survival of civilians have come under relentless attack, Griffiths said that, as ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety.
“More and more people are being crammed into an ever-smaller sliver of land, only to find yet more violence and deprivation, inadequate shelter and a near absence of the most basic services,” he added.
“There is no safe place in Gaza,” he said, noting that dignified human life is “a near impossibility”.
Rafah, where the pre-crisis population was around just 280,000 people, is now home to 1 million displaced persons. UN efforts to send humanitarian convoys to the north have been met with delays, denials and the imposition of impossible conditions.
“Colleagues who have managed to make it to the North in recent days describe scenes of utter horror: Corpses left lying in the road. People with evident signs of starvation stopping trucks in search of anything they can get to survive,“ Griffiths said.
On Saturday, Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said in a statement that the “massive death, destruction, displacement, hunger, loss, and grief of the last 100 days are staining our shared humanity.”
“In the past 100 days, sustained bombardment across the Gaza Strip caused the mass displacement of a population that is in a state of flux - constantly uprooted and forced to leave overnight, only to move to places which are just as unsafe,” he said.
Lazzarini noted this has been the largest displacement of the Palestinian people since 1948 and the war in Gaza has affected more than 2 million people - the entire population of Gaza.
”Many will carry lifelong scars, both physical and psychological. The vast majority, including children, are deeply traumatized”, he said, adding that the plight of children in Gaza was especially heartbreaking.
“An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”
The head of UNRWA warned that the crisis in Gaza was a man-made disaster compounded by dehumanizing language and the use of food, water and fuel as instruments of war.
“Despite repeated calls, a humanitarian ceasefire is still not in place to stop the killing of people in Gaza and enable the safe delivery of food, medicine, water and shelter. The onset of winter makes life even more unbearable, especially for those living out in the open”, he said.
Among those killed are at least 148 UN staff, 337 health workers and 117 journalists.
“Aid workers, including 146 of my own UNRWA colleagues, were killed alongside doctors, journalists and children - no one is spared. Entire residential neighborhoods, places of worship, and historic buildings were razed, wiping out centuries of history, civilization and people’s memories,” the UNRWA chief said.
Over 60 percent of all housing units in the Gaza Strip, a densely populated area, have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities. This includes more than 65,000 housing units destroyed and more than 290,000 damaged. Entire residential neighborhoods have been razed to the ground.
“For the people of Gaza, the past 100 days have felt like 100 years”, Lazzarini stressed. “It is high time we restore the value of human life.”
In a related development this week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has begun hearings in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in its war in Gaza. South Africa is asking the court to demand an emergency suspension of the Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Israel denies the accusation of genocide, although its security forces have killed more than one percent of the civilian population within three months and its political and military leadership is depriving the people in Gaza of access to the basic means of survival.
Over the past 14 weeks, Israel has pursued a massive and destructive military response. Following heavy bombardments by Israeli Forces, from the air, sea and land, the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip drastically deteriorated. The indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks by the IDF and the blockade imposed on Gaza by the Israeli government has led to a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of the tiny enclave.
The United Nations, humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations, and independent UN human rights experts have again and again called for the protection of civilians, an immediate ceasefire and the allowance of urgently needed humanitarian aid into Gaza, while a few influential governments continue to fuel the conflict and take no action to stop the ongoing humanitarian disaster in the occupied territory.
Humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations, and legal experts have repeatedly said that the killing of thousands of innocent children and women, the siege on an entire civilian population, and the trapping of bombarded civilians behind closed borders in Gaza are crimes under international law. They demand accountability for the crimes committed against civilians in Gaza, from political and military leaders as well as those who provided arms and political or other support.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: Israel -Occupied Palestinian Territory situation, 100 days on, press briefing notes, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, released January 12, 2024
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2024/01/israel-occupied-palestinian-territory-situation-100-days
Full text: The Gaza Strip: 100 days of death, destruction and displacement, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, statement by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, published January 13, 2024
https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/gaza-strip-100-days-death-destruction-and-displacement
Full text: Mr. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator - Briefing to the UN Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 12 January 2024, OCHA, released January 12, 2024
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/mr-martin-griffiths-under-secretary-general-humanitarian-affairs-and-emergency-relief-coordinator-briefing-un-security-council-humanitarian-situation-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territory-12-january-2024-enhe
Full text: Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Request for the indication of provisional measures - Conclusion of the public hearings, 11–12 January 2024 (No. 2024/3), International Court of Justice (ICJ), press release, published January 12, 2024
https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240112-pre-01-00-en.pdf