Desperate Gazans driven by acute hunger after two months of siege are stopping United Nations aid trucks, taking food off them and devouring it on the spot, the head of the U.N. agency aiding Palestinians reported Thursday.
“This is how desperate and hungry they are — I witnessed this firsthand,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, said at a news conference in Geneva on Thursday, two days after visiting Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.
“Everywhere you look is congested with makeshift shelters,” he added. “Everywhere you go, people are hungry, desperate and terrified.”
Mr. Lazzarini’s comments added to a chorus of warnings from U.N. officials and aid workers that social order has been breaking down in the Gaza Strip, as Israel’s assault has continued and shortages of food, clean water and medicine have become dire.
Israel has been pushing Gaza’s 2.2 million residents relentlessly south as its forces seek to destroy Hamas’s military wing and its infrastructure, and about 85 percent of the population has been displaced, according to the United Nations.
Rafah was home to a few hundreds of thousands of people before the war, and its population has skyrocketed in recent weeks. People fleeing the air campaign in the north arrived early in the war, even though Israel has continued to bombed targets in Rafah as well. Tens of thousands more have arrived this month, aid groups say, clustering the areas of Tel al-Sultan, and Al-Mawasi, farther west on the Mediterranean coast.
Many in Rafah are now living in squalid, cramped conditions, with only crude, improvised shelters to protect them from the elements as winter sets in. Each day is a struggle to get adequate food and clean water. Toilets are scarce.
Though Rafah is one of the few cities in Gaza to receive aid shipments in recent weeks, hunger and communicable disease are still spreading rapidly, aid groups and U.N. officials say.
Satellite imagery released this week put the number of people near the border in stark relief, showing large numbers of makeshift shelters in the area of Tel al-Sultan. Comparisons with photos of the same area taken last month show that the density of displaced Gazans has skyrocketed since Israel began issuing evacuation orders this month for parts of Khan Younis, a larger city six miles to the north.
The images correspond with reports from officials of relief organizations, who have warned that southern Gaza is not equipped to provide even basic services to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who have ended up there.
The bleak conditions have increased fears that the border with Egypt could be breached, allowing large number of Palestinian refugees to enter Egypt, potentially destabilizing an Arab ally of the United States.
Mr. Lazzarini denied allegations from Israel that U.N. aid trucks have been diverted by Hamas, the armed group that controlled the Gaza Strip and started the current round of violence when its forces crossed the border and killed 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
Mr. Lazzarini also called for a drastic increase in deliveries using Israel’s main crossing point at Kerem Shalom, which has been limited to the inspection of aid by Israeli officials. Conditions in Gaza, he said, had reached “a make or break moment for all of us and our shared humanity.”
Ben Hubbard contributed reporting.