Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, reacts to the milestone reached in the violence of Israeli bombings against the Gaza Strip and denounces the dangerous assimilation of the Palestinian population of the enclave with Hamas.
It was, Saturday October 28, the guest ofInternationala TV5 Monde program presented by Françoise Joly, and including The world is a partner.
What is the situation in Gaza after last night’s Israeli strikes?
The director of our operations in southern Gaza – the only member of our staff we were able to reach this Saturday morning, by satellite, when telephone and Internet no longer work – said: “We have never heard, in memory, bombings of such intensity. » However, we had already had the impression, over the last few days, that we had reached a paroxysm in terms of intensity.
There were strikes against the northern part, in Khan Younes [dans le sud de la bande de Gaza], where there are a large number of displaced people sheltered in UNRWA installations. The previous twenty days of war have already had disastrous consequences for the population, with hundreds of thousands of displaced people, thousands of dead, even more wounded, in a Gaza Strip under total blockade, where it is not possible to provide sufficient humanitarian aid.
Now there is an atmosphere of anxiety, of panic, with the fear that there will be new population movements. The 300,000 to 400,000 inhabitants who are still in the North were again ordered on Friday by the Israeli army to move en masse towards the South. It is obviously impossible to move during intense bombardments. Our fear is that, once in the South, the populations will be pushed even further, near the Egyptian border.
UNRWA has suffered colossal losses since the start of Israel’s war against Gaza, which followed Hamas’ bloody attack on Israel on October 7. Our employees live in the same conditions as the rest of the population, they are part of the displaced people who have gone to the South. Some were able to stay in the North, by personal choice, like other civilians. But our operations today are taking place in the South.
Since the start of the war, 57 members of our teams have been killed (according to figures available on Friday). This is unsustainable. We have 13,000 employees in Gaza, including 2,000 who work for emergency response. They are all Palestinian refugees, except for a small team of internationals. If I compare with Syria, UNRWA lost 17 employees there in more than ten years of war.
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