Israel has escalated the confrontation against the United Nations this Wednesday by refusing the visa to the head of humanitarian affairs of the UN, Martin Griffiths, to “teach them a lesson”, as a result of the comments that his superior, the secretary general of the same organization , António Guterres, made during the Security Council that was held yesterday.
Israeli media report that Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said this Wednesday on army radio: “Due to your statements we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already denied the visa” to the UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths. “The time has come to teach them a lesson,” he added.
Israel, through Ambassador Erdan himself, yesterday called for Guterres to resign after he said that the “horrible attacks” by Hamas against Israel on October 7 cannot justify the “collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” and spoke of “ the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.”
Addressing the UN, the Secretary-General went on to say that the attack on Israel did not happen “out of nowhere” but came after “56 years of suffocating occupation” of the Palestinian people by Israel, adding: “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy suffocated; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been fading.”
Shortly after, Erdan considered that Guterres should resign and described the speech as “shocking”, since, according to him, the UN chief “considers the massacre committed by the Nazi terrorists of Hamas in a distorted and immoral way.”
Within the framework of this dispute between Tel Aviv and the UN, it is worth adding the ultimatum given this Wednesday by the organization’s humanitarian agencies, saying that they will be forced to stop their operations in Gaza tonight due to a lack of fuel. Likewise, they denounced the chaotic situation of the hospitals in the strip, with overcrowded patients and corpses stacked in tents.
In its daily report on the situation in Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs indicated that its staff have visited several hospitals in the Palestinian strip that show “unprecedented levels of devastation.”
“In one of the hospitals, hundreds of wounded men, women and children lay on beds, stretchers and on the floor, most of them unconscious, with open wounds,” the report said, adding that dozens of lifeless bodies were piled up in a grocery store. campaign abroad as the mortuary was full.
In these hospitals, “fuel is highly rationed, being used only for critical facilities, and many of the emergency generators are not designed to operate continuously, so they may break down,” the report highlights.
The lack of food means that many children and women, especially pregnant and lactating women, are at risk of malnutrition, which could affect their immune system and increase the possibility of them suffering from anemia or fatal bleeding, warns the United Nations.
The report warns, as the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the main provider of humanitarian services in Gaza, already noted on Tuesday, that its assistance activities could have to stop tonight, Wednesday, if it does not enter fuel on the strip.
In recent days, dozens of trucks with medicine, food and other humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza through the Rafah border crossing, on the border with Egypt, although in quantities much smaller than those needed. But the arrival of fuel, vital for generators and water desalination plants to continue operating, has not been authorized.
The UN indicated in its report, citing figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, that Tuesday was the day with the most deaths due to the military attacks on the territory, 704, which brings the total number of deaths in Gaza since October 7 to 5,791 ( 2,360 of them children), with 16,297 injured. They are joined by more than 1,550 missing people believed to be dead or trapped under the rubble of attacked buildings, among whom it is believed that there could be up to 870 children, according to Palestinian sources.
More than a third of hospitals and two-thirds of clinics in Gaza, according to the latest available data, have stopped operations due to lack of fuel or due to damage suffered in attacks, which have also killed 16 health workers and 35 of UNRWA. Up to 590,000 of Gaza’s 1.4 million internally displaced people are housed in UNRWA shelters, in overcrowded conditions.
In the West Bank, hostilities since October 7 have caused 95 deaths among the Palestinian population, 28 of them children, the report recalls.
