Gaza becoming unviable – UN

The director of communications for the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, Juliette Touma said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is currently sheltering nine times as many people in Gaza as it planned.

“Now 1.3 million people are in overcrowded UNRWA shelters that are themselves unprotected,” she said, adding disease and hunger are spreading in its facilities.

“People don’t have enough food; they are getting hungry. Many of them are getting very understandably frustrated,” she continued.

Touma told Al Jazeera that the UN agency has seen break-ins at its aid warehouses in Gaza, and its aid trucks have been stopped on the street.

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“People literally started taking food from those trucks and eating it then and there,” she said. “That shows if the war continues, Gaza is going to sink further into the abyss.”

Her organisation and many others say only a ceasefire can begin to improve the situation in Gaza, but “quite often our calls have gone unheeded”.

Speaking in the same vein, the aid group Doctors without Borders said people in south Gaza are falling ill as they pack into crowded shelters or sleep in tents in open areas.

Nicholas Papachrysostomou, the group’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, says “every other patient” at a clinic in Rafah has a respiratory infection after prolonged exposure to cold and rain.

“In some shelters, 600 people share a single toilet. We are already seeing many cases of diarrhoea. Often children are the worst affected,” he said.

With almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people crowded into the south, many worry Palestinians will be forced out of the territory altogether in a repeat of the 1948 mass expulsion known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.