BRUSSELS (AP) — If Israel’s military goes ahead with a planned offensive in Gaza City, then “all hope is gone that we’re ever going to see the end to this,” a United Nations official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Israel says the evacuation of Gaza’s most populated city is “inevitable,” adding to international alarm for hundreds of thousands of people there as famine — documented and declared — threatens to spread after 22 months of war.
Sam Rose, the acting director of Gaza operations for UNRWA, or the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said some people are too old, too young or too ill or incapacitated to evacuate Gaza City as Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have deployed to its outskirts.
“You’ve got a population that’s living in abject fear, in abject cruelty, abject humiliation, that has no control whatsoever over their day-to-day, their minute-to minute lives,” Rose said. “Just think for a minute about what that means for any human being, but what it means for parents, what it means for children who’ve grown up knowing nothing but this.”
Instead of an offensive, all efforts should be made to provide services and support to keep people alive, he said.
Rose was in Gaza from February 2024 until March of this year. The agency was feeding 1.2 million people a day in Gaza before the war began with the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
He said 6,000 trucks full of lifesaving aid including food, medicine, fuel and water have been stuck outside Gaza for months. The U.N. has cited Israeli restrictions.
“That’s enough food to feed everyone, enough soap to give everyone, enough nappies, diapers,” Rose said.
Separately, the European commissioner for humanitarian aid and crisis management, Hadja Lahbib, described “mountains” of aid sitting at the Gaza border. She also denounced the plan for the military offensive.
The European Union’s recent agreement with Israel to ramp up aid for Gaza has not worked out, Lahbib said, and pleaded for access: “Let us save lives.”
Israel’s government, which blocked all aid into Gaza for two and a half months earlier this year, asserts it has allowed enough aid to enter during the war. The U.N., however, has said the amount of aid entering and reaching Palestinians remains far below the roughly 600 trucks a day that entered before the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly denied there’s starvation in Gaza, and his government called the recent famine declaration by international food security experts “an outright lie.”
The famine report earlier this month by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said nearly half a million people — about one-fourth of Gaza’s population — face catastrophic hunger, with many at risk of dying from malnutrition-related causes.
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Associated Press writer Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed.
