UN agencies appeal for greater access to Gaza to deliver life-saving aid

By Thaddeus Jones

The heads of the World Food Programme, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) have appealed for greater access to Gaza to bring desperately needed food and medicine to the people there. The current entry routes and restrictions are slowing their ability to bring even the minimum of supplies to assist the injured, sick, and hungry. 

The humanitarian agencies issued a joint press release on 15 January that underscores the need for "safer aid access and more supply routes" also to prevent famine and deadly disease outbreak in Gaza. It notes the spread of malnutrition and how "the shortage of food, clean water, and medical assistance is particularly severe in the northern areas" and "efforts to set up service points for people in need are hampered by bombardments and constantly shifting battle fronts."

Gaza’s 335,000 children under 5 years of age are at highest risk for life-threatening malnutrition, the statement notes, given the widespread destruction of infrastructure and the inability to grow food now, creating total reliance on outside aid. Since the start of the hostilities, the UN agencies and partners have tried to assist the health system in Gaza with the provision of medical equipment and supplies, medicines, fuel, and coordination of emergency medical teams. 

The UN agencies have again reiterated the call for "a humanitarian ceasefire to enable this vitally important roll-out of a massive, multi-agency humanitarian operation."

World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Tarik Jašarević spoke to Vatican News about the emergency situation and urgent needs in Gaza in the following radio interview.

Can you tell us about the humanitarian situation in Gaza right now?

The situation is catastrophic for the population of Gaza. When it comes to health services, we see less health services being available, while more and more people are in need of those health services. So as the bombardment continues, there are more people who are wounded, more people who are killed as well. Already the number of killed people has gone over 24,000 and 70% of them are women and children. So it's more than 1% of the population of Gaza. 

Now those who are injured would need to be treated in a hospital, but only 15 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning, and many of them are really struggling with just a fraction of health workers from what they had before. They are struggling with fuel, to have electricity, with clean water, with medical supplies, and not to forget that many civilians are sheltering in hospitals who also need food. So when we go to see these hospitals, it is really tragic situations that our colleagues describe to us with people without food, with people on the floor not being able to be treated. 

So now that's just talking about injured people. But on top of that, you have 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and we have more than 300,000 people with chronic diseases, people who need dialysis for renal failure, people with cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and other conditions. These people cannot access health services they need because these health services are not available. And on top of all of that, you have already the spread of diseases as people are pushed to ever smaller corners of Gaza. 90% of people of Gaza had to leave their homes. And now they are in ever smaller places with a lack of access to sanitation, to toilets, to clean water, with the temperature being low. 

So we have respiratory viruses circulating. We have diarrhea being reported because of a lack of clean water. We have skin diseases being reported because of a lack of clean water. We have a skin disease that's being reported because of a lack of sanitation. So it's really a dire situation and we are struggling to preserve the functionality of health systems because we don't have sufficient access. What we need is really access. We need more supplies being let in. We need more entry points to Gaza. We need more safety to travel inside Gaza. We need security guarantees. We need less restriction on what can come in and on the movement of aid workers. 

Indeed, you called for this in the appeal in your joint press release....

Yes, that's exactly what we were saying, is that with the current access, we are running into catastrophic scenario of famine, of a deadly cocktail of hunger and disease in Gaza. So we need to find ways to reach the population of Gaza. But eventually, even with that, the only real solution is immediate ceasefire, because as long as bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, there will be injured people and there will be more deaths.

How urgent is your timeline for things to happen to save lives?

It has to happen immediately. There are everyday people dying, children being killed, women being killed in Gaza. This should stop. There should be a political solution. There should be enough pressure from everyone to try to stop losing innocent lives in Gaza and find a solution to get to the ceasefire and get to that humanitarian space that we and others need to ensure the functionality of health services inside Gaza. 

Do you see any signs that your message is being heard even though oftentimes in the media we see the focus can be primarily on the mid-term and long-term solutions here but not the immediate emergency?

Well, we as humanitarians do what we can do and what we are doing is to try to support those in need and try to describe what we see. And this is what we have been doing since the beginning when we were calling for immediate release of hostages that have been taken from Israel. Then the humanitarian situation in Gaza became something that we had to focus on and we really need to be on the side of those who are suffering and that's clearly the population of Gaza right now. 

In terms of the magnitude of the emergency, I know you can't make comparisons but have you ever seen a situation as difficult as this in recent years?

As you say, it's very difficult to compare emergencies and human suffering is human suffering regardless where it is happening and any other element without discrimination. But really the scale of destruction of infrastructure in Gaza, the scale of killings is something that it is mind-blowing, just when you think that one percent of population have been killed in just over three months.