GAZA, November 12, 2024 (WAFA) The United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) Tuesday warned that the little aid trickling into the war-torn Gaza Strip had further dwindled.

Briefing reporters in Geneva from central Gaza, UNRWA senior emergency officer Louise Wateridge warned that "aid entering the Gaza Strip is at its lowest level in months".

Addressing a Geneva media briefing via video-link from Gaza on the situation in the besieged northern Strip, Wateridge stressed that the volume of aid currently entering the war-torn enclave is “the lowest in months”, with an average in October of only 37 trucks per day for the entire 2.2 million population.

According to UNRWA, this represents about six per cent of the commercial and humanitarian supplies allowed in before the war.

Commenting on the situation in the besieged northern Strip, which UNRWA described in a news feed as “a place of dead bodies lying in the streets and hospitals running out of blood packs,” Wateridge said that the situation was “nothing short of catastrophic”.

She warned that amid looming famine in the Gaza Strip, as winter approaches, those forcibly displaced are sleeping on the floor in makeshift shelters surrounded by sewage.

“We are extremely concerned when the rains come to the Gaza Strip, what will happen to 500,000 people who are in areas of flooding?” she said.

Asked about a Tuesday deadline set last month by the United States for Israel to improve the aid situation in the enclave, the UNRWA official said that instead, “aid supplies have lessened”.

The UN continues to be denied access to northern Gaza, she said, where people are “begging for pieces of bread, for water”. Wateridge added that 1.7 million people in the enclave, or some 80 per cent of the population, did not receive their food rations in October.

Last Friday, food security experts from the UN-partnered Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee issued an alert over imminent famine in areas within the northern Gaza Strip.

As suffering continues to worsen, “people are losing hope”, Wateridge said.

Just this week, two missions to northern Gaza which she was to take part in were denied; the aim had been to deliver chlorine tablets and assess the facilities of those sheltering.

“No one from UNRWA has been able to access the besieged north in over a month,” she said.

The UNRWA official spoke of “pleas and testimonies” from UN colleagues and from doctors in the hospitals in the north, which have been bombed. “The doctors inform us that they have run out of blood supplies. They have run out of medicine… There are bodies in the streets,” she said, adding that ambulances have “stopped functioning” and that people can only get to hospital by themselves, on donkey carts.

“Colleagues are trapped in residential buildings,” unable to leave, Wateridge said, while the eight UNRWA-run water wells in northern Gaza’s Jabaliya have all ceased operations, leaving people without clean water.

The UNRWA senior emergency officer reiterated the agency’s call to the Israeli occupation authorities for access to the besieged areas, which is becoming “more and more critical each hour now”.

Late last month, the Israeli Parliament voted to ban UNRWA from operating in the country and prohibit officials from having any contact with the agency. The laws are set to come into force 90 days from their adoption.

She reiterated the UNRWA’s call for an immediate ceasefire, adding that it was unacceptable that the war continued and civilians suffered.

“There needs to be a ceasefire, a release and return of the hostages home and finally some respite to all the civilians, not just in the Gaza Strip, but the surrounding region,” she concluded.

Israel has proceeded with its genocidal offensive on the war-torn Strip in complete disregard of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered Israel in a legally binding decision to halt its military offensive in Rafah, which may violate its obligations under the Genocide Convention.

Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7, killing at least 43,665 Palestinians and injuring over 103,076 others.

Moreover, at least 10,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

K.F.