Gaza residents live near huge piles of rubbish, UNRWA warns

A senior official at the UN refugee agency UNRWA described living conditions in the Palestinian territory as “dire” on Friday, where humanitarian aid has been trickling in.

“It’s worse than it’s ever been. And I have no doubt that tomorrow it will be even worse.” In the south of the Gaza Strip, residents live in ruins of buildings or tents around a gigantic pile of waste, denounced, Friday June 28, a mission manager from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). A pile of some 100,000 tonnes of waste, surrounded by tents, is accumulating, according to his testimony, while fierce fighting pitted the Israeli army against Hamas fighters on Saturday in the north of the Gaza Strip.

Louise Wateridge, who returned to Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday after four weeks outside the Palestinian territory, stressed that during this time the situation had “considerably deteriorated”. Bombed buildings reduced to the state of “skeletons, or nothing at all. Everything is in ruins”and yet, she stressed, in front of the press in Geneva, via video link, “People are living there again.” “There’s no water, no sanitation, no food. And now people are living in these buildings again that are empty shells.”she noted.

The war has caused a humanitarian catastrophe in the small, besieged Palestinian territory of 2.4 million inhabitants, more than half of whom have been displaced: water and food are lacking and the health system is on its knees. According to the World Health Organization, 10,000 patients would need to be evacuated from Gaza for treatment.

Thursday saw the first medical evacuations from Gaza to neighboring Egypt since the Rafah border crossing was closed in early May, when Israeli forces took control of the Palestinian side of the crossing. The war, triggered by an unprecedented attack by the Islamist movement in Israel on October 7, has not let up across the Palestinian territory and has raised fears of a conflagration in Lebanon.