UN agencies: Gaza has become a graveyard and it seems that all roads lead to death

This was stated by Rosalia Pauline, UNICEF’s chief communications officer in Gaza, who said that the children of the Strip are “sick, tired and psychologically traumatized,” while hunger and malnutrition threaten their lives.

She said: “Gaza is one of the saddest places for us as humanitarian workers, because every small effort to save a child’s life is lost due to violent destruction. For more than 14 months, children have been on the brink of this nightmare, with more than 14,500 children reported killed, and Thousands more.”

“My eyes preceded me to heaven.”

Speaking from the Jordanian capital, Amman, to reporters in Geneva on Friday, Pauline described her meeting with a five-year-old boy named Saad, who suffered life-changing injuries in the bombing of his home where he lost his sight.

“He said to me, ‘My eyes have preceded me to heaven.’ While we were talking, a plane flew over us, and the moment he heard the plane, he froze and screamed and grabbed his mother. Seeing this boy in such a state of deep panic was frankly unbearable.”

The UNICEF communications officer in Gaza said the stories she heard in Gaza “will torment her forever.” She also told reporters about another child named Saad, whom she had met in the summer when he was seven months old and weighed only 2.7 kilograms. The child recently died of malnutrition, which was a “miracle” for his mother after she had tried to have children for many years.

Pauline added: “He was born into war and left this world without being given the chance to live in peace. I cannot even imagine how much his parents are suffering. The suffering is not only physical, it is also psychological.”

Days stolen from children

As winter descends on Gaza, Pauline said that the children… “They feel cold and wet when they are barefoot.” While many of them are still wearing summer clothes. She added that children are searching among the rubble for pieces of plastic to burn, and that diseases are widespread in the Gaza Strip in light of the lack of health services and hospitals being constantly attacked.

She said: “There are immediate things we can all do today to make life more bearable for these children. We can use our voices, our political capital and our diplomatic influence to push for the evacuation of seriously injured children and their parents to leave Gaza and seek life-saving medical care in East Jerusalem or elsewhere.”

She stressed that every day passes without work “He steals another day from the children of Gaza.” hostess “Every delay costs more lives. This war must haunt every one of us. The children of Gaza cannot wait.”

No protection from cold and splinters

UNRWA emergency officer Louise Waterridge said that weather conditions have worsened in recent days and this pattern will continue as expected, but the agency has been forced to prioritize food over shelter assistance.

She said: “We have supplies outside the Gaza Strip waiting to enter the Strip for six months. This is the reality that humanitarian workers live here. We have to choose between people getting food or getting shelter.”

Speaking from the Nuseirat area in the center of the Strip, she said that 69 percent of the Strip’s buildings were damaged or destroyed not only means that people are facing harsh winter conditions, but that they are also not protected from bombs and air strikes.

added: “We hear from doctors that children are exposed to shrapnel injuries as a result of raids that occurred one kilometer away from where they are, because there are only tents and tarps to protect them from bombs and bullets.”

“What we cannot see”

Waterdridge said that over the past year she has talked about what she can see, including young children with missing limbs, families trapped under rubble with the United Nations and emergency teams denied access to rescue them, and people searching for scraps of food in the garbage to feed their families, but today she wants to focus on “What we cannot see.”

She said that the agency had been denied access to Rafah every day since it was forced to leave in May after it considered Rafah – south of Gaza – a center for humanitarian operations. She said: “We have no idea what Rafah looks like today. We are still denied access to the besieged north. Hospitals continue to be attacked, and schools sheltering people are attacked. Time and time again, almost systematically, the United Nations is denied access to provide aid and support to people in the north.” “Besieged.”

While she considered journalists in the sector heroes for bringing images of the dire situation on the ground to the world, Waterridge pointed out that what people see in their reports and on social media is from the perspective of those who are able to flee for their lives when the raids rain down.

She said: “What we don’t see are the people who cannot flee. We don’t see the elderly. We don’t see the young children whose parents were killed in the strikes – who are left with no way to communicate what is going on. The world does not see what is happening to these people. The entire community here is now a graveyard. “They don’t have the luxury of even mourning their relatives because they are just trying to survive.”

All roads lead to death

The UNRWA official told reporters the story of an 80-year-old woman she met in Gaza City. The woman was being pushed in a wheelchair across a checkpoint between the besieged north and Gaza City by her young male relatives when she was killed by snipers. “She was sitting in a wheelchair, and she had no ability to do anything. She could not move herself. She had to watch the male members of the family being eaten in front of her by dogs. She was only pushed into Gaza City after another family passed through the checkpoint and helped her.” “.

As the year draws to a close, Waterridge recalled that more than two million people remain trapped in appalling conditions in Gaza and deprived of their basic needs. She said: “They can’t escape, and it’s like every path you can take leads to death.”