A senior UN assistance official asked on Thursday, amid the raging conflict in Gaza and the challenges facing humanitarian operations, “what has become of our basic humanity.”
“We cannot plan more than 24 hours in advance because we struggle to know what supplies we will have, when we will have them, or where we will be able to deliver,” stated Joyce Msuya, acting director of the UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA).
“People are starving. They want to drink. They’re ill. They have nowhere to live. She told the Security Council, “They have been pushed beyond… what any human being should bear.”
Msuya’s comments came after the UN had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.
“More than 88 percent of Gaza’s territory has come under an (Israeli) order to evacuate at some point,” Msuya said, adding that civilians, “in a state of limbo,” were being forced into an area equivalent to just 11 percent of the Gaza Strip.
“The evacuation orders appear to defy the requirements of international humanitarian law,” she added.
As the number of civilian deaths from Israel’s battle with Hamas climbs, more people are paying attention to the conflict; yet, foreign powers, including the US, have not been able to assist in mediating a ceasefire.
According to an AFP count based on Israeli official data, 1,199 people, largely civilians, were killed in Hamas’s October 7 onslaught on southern Israel, which set off the current war.
The health ministry of Gaza reports that at least 40,602 individuals have died as a result of Israel’s military campaign of retaliation. Most of the dead, according to the UN rights office, are women and children.
“What we have witnessed over the past 11 months… calls into question the world’s commitment to the international legal order that was designed to prevent these tragedies,” Msuya said.
“It forces us to ask: what has become of our basic sense of humanity?”Calling on the Security Council and wider international community to use its leverage to end the war, Msuya urged the release of hostages and “a sustained ceasefire in Gaza.”
