A SENIOR UNITED Nations humanitarian official has said there is an urgent need for an injection of $2 billion (€1.1 billion) of aid to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Ramesh Rajasingham is the Head of the UN’s Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) in Geneva and is in charge of their coordination division.
The senior official is part of the UNOCHA delegation visiting Dublin to meet with Irish Aid and the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss ongoing humanitarian crises around the world, including Gaza.
Gaza’s main hospital, the Al-Shifa hospital, has been forced to bury scores of dead patients in a mass grave.
Ireland is a significant contributor to UNOCHA. Last month the Tánaiste Micheál Martin announced €13m in humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, split between UNOCHA and UNRWA, the UN’s body that supports Palestinian refugees.
Speaking to The Journal ahead of the visit to Leinster House he said the humanitarian crisis is one of the worst he has seen in his four decades of humanitarian work.
“The situation in Gaza is the worst we have ever seen,” he said.
The official said that there are 1.5 million people displaced by the Israeli and Hamas fighting not just in the north of Gaza but across the enclave.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the major UN agency on the ground.
Rajasingham said that there are 200,000 displaced people residing in UNRWA centres which means that those people are either with host families in the south, or having to look for temporary accommodation in tents.
“It is a really desperate situation. There is no water, the water being pumped in is minimal. And in many cases, the people of Gaza are getting 1.5 litres per person per day, which is way below the emergency threshold of 50 litres per day,” he added.
Rajasingham said that the situation is further exacerbated by a “devastating situation of the health services” due to a lack of electricity. He said this is because of a lack of fuel coming into Gaza to feed over stretched generators.
“There’s no electricity for the incubators in the hospitals and so we’ve literally had people dying, babies dying the last few days because of the lack of electricity to maintain some of the equipment in hospitals,” he said.
Rajasingham said the situation is so grave that they are now requesting an emergency donation from the international community donors of financial aid to the humanitarian body.
“We are asking for a massive scale up in terms of assistance. There is a need ow for $1.2 billion dollars to provide assistance for 1.5 million displaced persons in an overall of 2.7 million people.
“That means the entire population of Gaza is now a humanitarian case, plus 500,000 people in the West Bank, because while Gaza, has been going on, we’ve seen the worst situation in the West Bank for many years, in terms of the number of people to being killed,” he added.
Rajasingham said that without that funding they are “backs up against the wall” as just 10% of the $1.2 billion has been provided.
He said he was unable to comment whether the forceable movement of civilians from the North by the Israeli military is ethnic cleansing.
“We have three major asks, from our side. We desperately need a humanitarian cease fire immediately.
“This is to allow for some degree of respect for the population, and to prevent further killing.
“The second thing is, we need a massive scale up in assistance going into Gaza, which has to be supported and include fuel and water.
“So we need to allow for many, many more trucks of assistance to go into Gaza and to have the wherewithal of forces to be able to logistically move them and, and directly help the population.
“Thirdly, we need the release of the hostages, as well as civilian hostages that have been taken. So to be able to do number two, which is the assistance we need,” he added.
Rajasingham said that his agency is dealing with the Gaza crisis but it is only one of many crises across the globe.
He said that focus has shifted from major issues in the Horn of Africa, in Sudan and across the Sahel region as well as major humanitarian cases in Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine.
He said he did not think that it was so-called crisis fatigue in the international committee but rather the sheer volume of populations across the world in trouble.
“For the most part, donors are being generous. It’s just the level of needs that have been accelerating that has far outstripped the ability of donors to support this activity.
“Often, in many cases the humanitarians are left to pick up the pieces and we’ve gone from being the actor of last resort, that people tend to use us when everything else fails to be the actual first resort,” he added.
1,400 Israelis were killed when Hamas fighters launched a devastating early morning raid inside Israel on 7 October. The majority of those killed were civilians. 241 hostages are being held by Hamas inside Gaza – many with dual citizenship status.
In the aftermath of the shock attack, a bombing and ground offensive was launched by Israeli forces on Gaza which has killed more than 11,000 people, according to health ministry officials inside Gaza. The majority of those killed were civilians.
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