A UN spokesman on Friday condemned the ‘intolerable’ situation in besieged Gaza.
He said residents of Gaza are forced to live in tents in buildings destroyed by bombs or in front of huge piles of rubbish.
Louise Wateridge, an official at UNRWA, the United Nations agency set up to assist Palestinian refugees, described the “extremely hostile” environment for living in the Gaza Strip.
“The situation is truly unbearable,” he told reporters via video-link from central Gaza.
Wateridge was out of the area for four weeks. He returned to Gaza on Wednesday and said the situation had “significantly deteriorated” in a short period of time.
“Today is definitely the worst day (in the history of Gaza). I have no doubt that tomorrow will be another ‘worst day’: he said.
In the nearly nine months of war between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been “destroyed,” Waterridge said.
He said he was ‘stunned’ to return to Khan Yunis in central Gaza.
He said, ‘If some part of the buildings remain, they have taken the form of skeletons. Almost everything has been reduced to rubble.’
He also said, ‘People are still living there.’
‘There is no water there. “There is no sanitation or food,” he said. “And now the empty shell-like buildings, covering the gaps in the bombed-out walls with blankets, have begun to live again,” he added.
With no toilets, ‘people are defecating wherever they can,’ added Wateridge.
The Gaza war started on October 7 with the Hamas attack on southern Israel. According to Israel, 1,200 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.
Israel’s retaliatory counter-attacks have so far killed more than 37,700 people, most of them civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.