Senior UN official slams Israel for leaving no safe place for civilians in Gaza, not even UN shelters
A senior United Nations official says Israel has left no safe place for civilians in the Gaza Strip, denouncing Tel Aviv for its “blatant disregard” for human life in the war-torn Palestinians territory, after the occupying entity even hit UN shelters there.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), sounded the alarm on Wednesday, stressing that there is “absolutely no safe place” in the densely-populated Gaza for civilians, not even in UN shelters and so-called “safe zones” designated by Israel itself.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long suppression and devastation against Palestinians.
More than 16,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, and over 43,000 others injured since the onset of the current US-backed war.
In an interview with Associate Press, Lazzarini said that since the outbreak of the ongoing war on Gaza, more than 80 UN facilities in the Gaza Strip have also been “directly or indirectly” hit, noting that these facilities included sites that have been sheltering civilians.
According to the UNRWA chief, more than 220 Palestinians were killed in such strikes, and that 130 of the agency’s employees also lost their lives in the war.
“I do believe that the blatant disregard of UN premises … will require an independent investigation in the future,” Lazzarini stressed.
The UN figures show that around 1.87 million Palestinians – more than 80 percent of Gaza’s population - have already fled their homes.
Lazzarini also said that UN-run shelters, which are currently home to more than one million displaced people, are in “totally overcrowded, appalling sanitary conditions.”
Separately on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter not used in decades, in a rare move to formally warn the UN Security Council of global danger from Israel’s brutal war on the besieged Gaza Strip.
Article 99 states that the UN chief “may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
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