The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) says civil order in the Gaza Strip is collapsing.
Filip Lazzarini said in Geneva on Tuesday that many trucks carrying aid are being looted and drivers are being threatened. Companies no longer wanted to make trucks available for relief deliveries.
To further illustrate the catastrophic situation on the ground, Lazzarini said that ten children and young people were losing one or both legs every day as a result of the war. These figures do not include hands or arms, he added.
In a speech to the aid agency’s board of trustees on Monday, Lazzarini described the situation on the ground as “hell.”
“In the past nine months, we have witnessed unprecedented failures of humanity,” he said, according to the transcript of the speech.
More than two million Gazans are living in ‘a nightmare from which they cannot wake up’.
The ‘catastrophic levels’ of hunger there are the result of human behavior. “Children are dying of malnutrition and dehydration while food and clean water wait in trucks.”
In his speech, Lazzarini called for the protection of UNRWA’s “crucial role.” It must be allowed to continue its work until a political solution is in sight, he said.
The UN considers Israel an occupying power and therefore considers the Israeli security forces as having an obligation to maintain law and order in Gaza. Since its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel no longer considers itself an occupying power.
UNRWA made headlines in January because Israel said that 12 of its employees were involved in the October 7 massacre, and that the organization as a whole had been infiltrated by Hamas.
An audit report by independent experts later concluded that UNRWA had put in place “robust” mechanisms to uphold its principle of neutrality.
