GENEVA, December 14. /TASS/. The Gaza Strip is not a place to live in now, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini said.
"Every time I witness more misery, more grief and sadness and I have the feeling that Gaza is not really a habitable place anymore. <…> Everywhere you look, is congested with makeshift shelters. Everywhere you go, people are desperate, hungry and terrified," he was quoted as saying on the UNRWA website.
"Now, Rafah (a city in the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt - TASS) is the epicenter of the displacement of Gazans. This is where over 1 million people have fled to the Governate, and most of them have been moved more than once since the beginning of the war," he said. "Rafah has quadrupled its number of people overnight. It is traditionally a place where the poorest in the Gaza Strip used to live, lacking the infrastructure and the basics. I’m saying this, because it is not the place to host more than 1 million people, and certainly not the entire Gaza Strip."
"Hunger is something people in Gaza have never ever known before," he noted. "But hunger has now emerged over the last few weeks and we meet more and more people who haven’t eaten for one, two or three days. And this is the reason why, we see people stopping sometimes trucks, downloading and eating on the spot."
Tensions flared up again in the Middle East on October 7 after militants from the Gaza Strip-based radical Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise incursion on Israeli territory, killing many Israeli kibbutz residents living near the Gaza border and abducting more than 200 Israelis, including women, children and the elderly. Israel declared a total blockade of the Gaza Strip and launched bombardments of the enclave and some areas in Lebanon and Syria, as well as a ground operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
On November 22, Hamas announced an agreement with Israel, which was brokered by Egypt and Qatar, on a four-day humanitarian truce in the Gaza Strip, which took effect on November 24. The sides extended the ceasefire several times but on the morning of December 1 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that Hamas had violated the truce in Gaza and opened fire on Israeli territory, thus prompting the IDF to resume combat operations in the Gaza Strip.