The United Nations calls on the international community to use all its influence to stop acts of war against civilians.
Sunday marks three months since the Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Since then, the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 22,000, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
There are more than two million people trapped inside Gaza as Israeli bombs continue to fall.
– Especially for children, the last 12 weeks have been painful: no food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day after day, UN emergency aid coordinator Martin Griffiths wrote in a statement on Friday.
Families sleep outside as temperatures drop. Areas where civilians were asked to move for their safety were bombed. Medical facilities are under constant attacks. Griffiths wrote in the UN statement that the few hospitals that are partially functioning are overwhelmed with painful cases, severely short of supplies, and crowded with desperate people searching for safety.
– Public health disaster
The emergency aid chief calls it a public health disaster and says famine is just around the corner.
– The spread of infectious diseases in overcrowded shelter centers with overflowing sewage. In the midst of this chaos, about 180 Palestinian women give birth every day. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded.
– Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Residents there witness daily threats to their existence, while the world watches, Griffiths writes.
We continue to demand an immediate end to the war, not only for the sake of the people of Gaza and their threatened neighbors, but for the sake of future generations who will never forget these 90 days of hell.
Griffiths calls on the parties to fulfill all their obligations under international law, including protecting civilians and meeting their basic needs, as well as the immediate release of all hostages.
– It is time for the international community to use all its influence to achieve this.
– Hell on earth
Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide described the situation in Gaza as “hell on earth.”
– Through the entire UN system they are now saying that there is no worse place on the planet, no worse humanitarian crisis than the one in Gaza, he told VG on Friday.
In the next few days, new signs were announced across Norway, in protest against the Israeli war and in support of the people in Gaza.
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