Disease Could Kill More People In Gaza Than The War, UN Warns

Gaza is not getting enough aid to meet basic emergency needs, the UN has warned, and the population is so ravaged by hunger, bombing and lack of clean water that deaths from disease could outstrip those from the war.

-  Emma Graham-Harrison , Julian Borger

“All this aid is triage, and its not even enough for triage,” the Unicef spokesman James Elder told a press conference in Geneva via video link from Gaza. “Everything here is emergency care.”

Aid workers in Gaza are racing to assess needs and deliver aid during a brief truce, the terms of which included allowing more food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies into the strip.

On a day when 12 hostages were freed by Hamas, US and Israeli spy chiefs flew to Qatar for talks on how to extend the ceasefire in exchange for the release of more captives.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that only a “trickle” of aid was reaching Gaza, even during the pause in fighting. “It’s barely registering,” said a spokeswoman, Margaret Harris .

And the scale of displacement meant that needs were growing daily, even when there were no more people injured by the attacks.

The UN estimates that 1.8 million people in Gaza have now fled their homes – nearly four in five residents . Children make up half of those now crowded into shelters, given shelter by relatives, or living outside in tents or cars.

“It is not just the hospitals,” said Harris. “Everybody everywhere has dire health needs now, because they are starving, because they lack clean water, they are crowded together, they are in terror so they have massive mental health needs.