Gaza, Cairo (Al-Ittihad)
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced yesterday that about 70 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip have been displaced since the beginning of the war with Israel, which amounts to about 1.5 million people.
Dozens of emergency shelters house hundreds of thousands of people, and are sometimes overcrowded, up to four times their capacity. Reports indicated that conditions in some shelters are deteriorating day by day. UNRWA said that in one of the shelters, there is only less than two square meters available for each person. At least 600 people are forced to share one bathroom within one facility, and there are thousands of cases of infectious diseases, diarrhea and chicken pox.
In accordance with military orders, a large number of people from the Gaza Strip walked yesterday amidst Israeli tanks, raising whatever white flags were available as they fled towards the south to escape the bombing fire.
Yesterday, Israel said that its forces penetrated deep into Gaza City, where residents said that tanks were stationed on its outskirts, in anticipation of a possible incursion into urban areas in Gaza.
It said earlier that it had besieged Gaza City, which is inhabited by about a third of the Strip’s population of 2.3 million people, and would attack it soon.
There was no indication on the ground that Israeli forces had penetrated in large numbers into the city, but army spokesman Richard Hecht indicated that the forces besieging the city might penetrate into the city.
In response to a question about the actual occurrence of these incursions, Hecht said: “I will not talk about how we operate from within our siege around Gaza City.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said in a statement at the beginning of a tour of the region during which he visited the Rafah crossing from the Egyptian side, which is the only way to bring in aid, “A whole month has passed of continuous suffering, bloodshed, destruction, anger and despair.”
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