UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini (European)

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that they have enough money to run their operations until the end of next May only, while UNICEF presented its testimony about the reality of hunger in the Gaza Strip.

Lazzarini's disclosure of the size of UNRWA's resources came after a number of donors stopped funding the agency due to Israeli accusations that some of its employees participated in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7.

Lazzarini added that this situation shows how bad the organization's financial situation is.

This agency provides its services to approximately 5.9 million people, and about two-thirds of this number live in 58 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2022, the number of students enrolled in the agency’s schools reached 544,710.

Lazzarini said that Israel's decision to prevent the passage of agency convoys to northern Gaza aims to prevent people at risk of death from surviving.

Cruel death

As for the spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jens Laerke, he called on Israel to cancel its decision to prevent UNRWA aid from reaching northern Gaza.

Laerke said that people in Gaza were facing "cruel death due to starvation," and added, "The decision must be rescinded. You cannot claim to adhere to these provisions of international law when you block UNRWA food convoys."

For his part, UNICEF spokesman James Elder spoke of seeing children "as thin as paper in a hospital in northern Gaza and incubators full of underweight children and malnourished mothers."

Elder, who recently visited northern Gaza, said, “Tens of thousands of people are crowding the streets. They are making that universal gesture of raising hand to mouth in a desperate request for food.”

He added, "The necessary life support is being blocked, and lives are being lost. I saw children suffering from severe malnutrition and looking like skeletons."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said that shipments of animal feed were prevented from entering Gaza.

Source: Al Jazeera + agencies