“All night I spoke to a colleague who was in the compound and said: ‘We miraculously survived, the fire spread everywhere, even the tent where we slept burned. The scene is terrifying.” said Louise Wateridge, spokesperson for the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA.
Images shared by UNRWA showed rescuers searching for survivors at Al Aqsa Hospital on Monday, amid burnt-out tents and mangled metal frames.
More video showed an intense fire and smoke billowing from the center of a series of large tent shelters as emergency crews removed an apparently badly burned body from the ground of a charred tent after covering it with a blanket.
‘Humanity must prevail’
“Another night of horror in the middlelands…humanity must prevail” said UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.
At the school that was hit in Nuseirat, 22 people were reportedly killed. The facility was intended as a polio vaccination site on Monday. The strike was “just one of many incidents we witnessed overnight in the Gaza Strip,” Ms. Wateridge told UN News. “These are people who are just hiding. They are just trying to find a place to sleep and trying to find some safety in the Gaza Strip, where there is absolutely none.”
More than 140 UNRWA schools have been attacked since the start of the war.
Despite the ongoing war in Gaza sparked by Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the UN agency confirmed that hundreds of UN staff and partners had started the second round of polio vaccinations for children on Monday. At an UNRWA school-turned-shelter in Deir Al Balah, young people lined up for their vaccine doses, a scene that will be repeated in central Gaza over the next three days until teams move south for another 72 hours.
“The aim is to reach approximately 590,000 children under the age of 10 in less than two weeks,” UNRWA said.
As part of the campaign, children will also receive vitamin A in addition to the new oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2), to help them resist the threat of disease posed by their “extremely poor hygienic and sanitary conditions”.
According to the UN World Health Organization, the first round from September 1 to 12, 559,161 children were successfully vaccinated, or an estimated 95 percent of eligible youth at the governorate level.
The most difficult area to vaccinate remains the north “No food aid” has been introduced since October 1UNRWA added, echoing warnings from the UN Aid Coordination Office, OCHAwhich one said that “no essential business” should have been allowed to pass through checkpoints running from south to north.
“Pressure is increasing on the more than 400,000 people remaining in northern Gaza to leave for the south,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UN’s top aid official in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Ordered to leave
In a statement, humanitarian coordinator Hadi noted that the Israeli military had again issued evacuation orders on October 7, 9 and 12, as hostilities “continue to escalate, resulting in increased civilian suffering and casualties.” More than 50,000 people have been displaced from the region Jabaliya camp area still under siege“while others remain stranded in their homes amid increasing bombing and fighting,” he said.
Needs in the north remain desperate, the senior UN official stressed, amid military operations that have closed “water wells, bakeries, medical points and shelters,” while protection services, malnutrition treatment and temporary learning spaces have also been suspended. Hospitals “have seen an influx of trauma injuries,” Mr. Hadi noted.
