GAZA (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s ongoing war has destroyed 92% of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Monday.
“Families in Gaza face unimaginable devastation. According to the Protection Cluster, 92% of homes have been damaged or destroyed,” UNRWA said in a statement.
“Countless people have been displaced multiple times, and shelter is scarce,” it said, renewing its call for lifting the Israeli siege on the Palestinian enclave.
Since March 2, the Zionist regime has kept Gaza crossings closed to food, medical, and humanitarian aid, deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis in the enclave, according to government, human rights, and international reports.
On Sunday, the Israeli army began a broad ground aggression in the war-torn territory.
The Israeli army has pursued a brutal assault against Gaza since October 2023, killing more than 53,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief urged member states on Monday to adopt the long-negotiated pandemic agreement, warning of deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza, a funding crisis at the WHO, and the resurgence of polio in some parts of the world.
“Every World Health Assembly is significant, but this year’s is especially so,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the opening of the 78th World Health Assembly in Geneva. “At this Assembly, member states will consider, and hopefully adopt, the WHO Pandemic Agreement. This is truly a historic moment.”
After more than three years of negotiations, World Health Organization (WHO) member states reached a milestone in pandemic preparedness by finalizing a draft pandemic agreement on April 16.
Describing the development as a mixture of “joy, triumph, relief, exhaustion,” he said: “I look forward to your adoption of the agreement.”
Turning to humanitarian emergencies, Tedros issued a stark warning about the situation in Gaza, where the WHO recently negotiated a humanitarian pause to vaccinate over 560,000 children for polio.
Two months into the latest blockade, two million people are starving, while 116,000 tons of food are blocked at the border, Tedros said.
He lamented that people are dying from “preventable diseases as medicines wait at the border, while attacks on hospitals deny people care, and deter them from seeking it.”
“The risk of famine in Gaza is increasing with the deliberate withholding of humanitarian aid, including food, in the ongoing blockade,” he said. “Increasing hostilities, evacuation orders, shrinking humanitarian space, and the aid blockade are driving an influx of casualties to a health system that is already on its knees.”
He confirmed that WHO has supported medical evacuations of over 7,300 patients, including 617 cancer patients, but added that more than 10,000 patients still require medical evacuation from Gaza.