The Gaza Strip has been effectively “split into two” by Israel’s blockades and restrictions, with both displaced people and aid workers trying to assist them affected, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Wednesday.
Andrea de Domenico said that Palestinians in the besieged and bombed territory had been forcibly displaced several times, saying that people had been compelled to “completely reset their lives over and over again”.
“People, in the last nine months, have been moved around like ‘pawns in a board game’ – forced from one location to the next, to the next [and] to the next, irrespective of our ability of support them and irrespective of the availability of services wherever they land,” he said, as quoted in an OCHA statement.
De Domenico added that aid workers also had to keep moving their bases of operation from one location to the next as the Israeli military attacked new areas.
“The military operations are pushing [us] again and flipping the table,” he said, according to OCHA.
While de Dominico said that the UN was still talking to the Israeli government about getting aid into Gaza and distributing it, Israeli army orders to Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis had “wiped out” all the “hard work” done by UN agencies in Gaza.
The UN estimates that 1.9 million people in the Gaza Strip – around 80% of the population – has been displaced, with some of these being displaced up to 10 times.
“They have been forced to move because of the patterns of the war [and] heavy fighting that has impacted them whenever they took the risk to stay,” the OCHA head said.
The situation forced aid workers to restart their work “over and over again”, while displaced people had to work out where to find food, water, and medicine from scratch multiple times.
De Domenico said that “nowhere and no one is safe” in Gaza – neither civilians nor aid workers.
He said that 274 aid workers and volunteers had been killed in Gaza so far.
“[Humanitarians] risk their life every day and there are [few, if any] humanitarian installations that have been spared when the frontline moves … despite our efforts to notify the locations, the reality … is frequently those places are hit,” he added.
Israel has accused the main UN agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, of cooperating with Hamas and has frequently targeted its staff, abusing detained UNRWA workers.
Its indiscriminate war on Gaza has killed over 38,000 people so far, most of them women and children.
