The average citizen in Gaza lives on two pieces of bread made from flour stored by the United Nations in the Strip, yet the main phrase now heard on the street is “water. Water,” according to the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, Thomas White.
White, who said he had traveled the length and breadth of Gaza in the past few weeks, described the lands as a “theatre of death and destruction,” noting that “no place is safe, and people fear for their lives, their future, and their ability to feed their families.”
White told diplomats from the 193 UN member states in a brief statement via video technology from Gaza that UNRWA supports some 89 bakeries across Gaza, with the aim of delivering bread to 1.7 million people.
But he said: “Now people are no longer looking for bread. They are looking for water.”
Deputy UN Coordinator for the Middle East Lynn Hastings, who is also the Humanitarian Coordinator for the Palestinian Territories, said that only one of the three water supply lines coming from Israel was working.
“A lot of people depend on brackish or salty groundwater,” she said.
In the brief statement, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Martin Griffiths also said that intensive negotiations are taking place between the authorities of Israel, Egypt, the United States and the United Nations, regarding allowing fuel to enter Gaza.
He stressed that fuel is necessary for the functioning of institutions, hospitals, and the distribution of water and electricity, and added: “We must allow these supplies to enter Gaza in a reliable, frequent and reliable manner.”
Hastings said backup generators, essential to keep hospitals, water desalination plants, food production facilities and other essential services running, are shutting down one by one as fuel supplies run out.
White pointed to other major problems. He said that the sewage is not treated, but rather pumped into the sea, but “when you talk to municipal workers it turns out that once the fuel runs out, the sewage will flow into the streets.”
He also pointed out that the cooking gas that the private sector brought to Gaza from Egypt before the war was increasingly decreasing, and said that relief organizations such as UNRWA would not be able to intervene and increase the distribution network through the private sector for this essential item.
White said nearly 600,000 people are taking shelter in 149 UNRWA facilities, most of them schools, but the agency has lost contact with many areas in the north, where Israel is waging intense ground and air operations.
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2023-11-04 07:28:20
