As Gazans experience “the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,” famine is “around the corner,” according to UN emergency assistance head Martin Griffiths.
In a statement released on Friday, Griffiths said that Gaza had turned into “a place of death and despair,” citing tens of thousands of deaths, attacks on medical institutions, and a dearth of operational hospitals.
He went on, “Hope has never been more elusive.”
According to Griffiths, a public health catastrophe is developing as infectious illnesses proliferate in overcrowded shelters and sewers overflow, and 180 Palestinian women “are giving birth daily amidst this chaos.”
“Gaza is just no longer livable. The world looks on while its people face daily risks to their basic survival,” Griffiths stated in a statement released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, tens of thousands of Palestinians have perished since Israel began its war on Hamas in Gaza, while the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) reports that up to 1.9 million people have been displaced since the conflict’s start. Israel started the battle in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 violent spree, which claimed over 200 lives and left 1,200 dead.
According to Griffiths, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, “Meanwhile, rocket attacks on Israel continue, more than 120 people are still held hostage in Gaza, tensions in the West Bank are boiling, and the specter of further regional spillover of the war is looming dangerously close.”
According to UNICEF, when famine circumstances worsen, young children are at a heightened risk of experiencing severe malnutrition. According to survivors who talked with from the southern city of Rafah, prices have skyrocketed for even essentials like fruits and vegetables.
The international community should “use all its influence to make this happen,” Griffiths continued, urging parties to “meet all their obligations under international law, including to protect civilians and meet their essential needs, and to release all hostages immediately.”
“Not only for the people of Gaza and its threatened neighbors but also for the generations to come who will never forget these 90 days of hell and assaults on the most fundamental human precepts, we continue to demand an immediate end to the war,” he continued.
Griffiths declared, “This war should never have started.” “The time for it to end is long overdue.”