UN staff now fainting from hunger, exhaustion. WHO worker detained

Worrying alerts from United Nations staff in the Gaza Strip who have been fainting from hunger and exhaustion over the past 48 hours have increased fears for people’s survival in the devastated enclave, UN humanitarians said. 

“Doctors, nurses, journalists, humanitarians, among them UNRWA staff, are hungry…fainting due to hunger and exhaustion while performing their duties,” said Juliette Touma, Director of Communications with the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA. 

Speaking from Amman, she stressed that seeking food “has become as deadly as the bombardments”.

The development comes as the UN human rights office, OHCHR, announced on Tuesday that more than 1,000 Palestinians have now been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get food in the Strip since the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) started operating on 27 May. 

“As of 21 July, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food,” said OHCHR spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan. “766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near UN and other humanitarian organizations’ aid convoys.” 

Mr. Al-Kheetan noted that the finding came from “multiple reliable sources on the ground, including medical teams, humanitarian and human rights organizations. It is still being verified in line with our strict methodology.”

The foundation’s hubs are supported by the US and Israeli authorities and started operating in southern Gaza on 27 May, bypassing the UN and other established non-governmental organizations (NGOs). 

Aid relief is not a job for mercenaries

“The so-called GHF distribution scheme is a sadistic death-trap,” UNRWA’s Ms. Touma said. “Snipers open fire randomly on crowds as if they're given a license to kill.” 

Quoting a statement by UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini, Ms. Touma called the scheme a “massive hunt of people in total impunity”.

“This cannot be our new norm. Humanitarian assistance is not the job of mercenaries,” she added.

The UNRWA spokesperson insisted that the UN and its humanitarian partners have the expertise, experience and available resources to provide safe, dignified and at-scale assistance. 

“We have proven it time and again during the last ceasefire,” she said.

Living conditions in the Strip have reached a new low as prices for basic commodities have increased by around 4,000 per cent. For Gaza’s inhabitants who have lost their homes and been displaced multiple times, they have no income and find themselves completely deprived of essentials.

$200 for a bag of flour

Ms. Touma highlighted the testimony of a colleague on the ground who had to walk for hours to buy a bag of lentils and some flour, paying almost $200 for it. 

On Monday, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said that a quarter of Gaza’s population faces famine-like conditions. Almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible.

Vital everyday items such as diapers are scarce and costly, at about $3 each. Mothers have resorted to using plastic bags instead while one father “said that he had to cut one of his last shirts to give his daughter sanitary pads”, Ms. Touma said.

“We at UNRWA have stocks of hygiene supplies, including diapers for babies and for adults waiting outside the gates of Gaza,” Ms. Touma stressed, insisting that the agency has 6,000 trucks loaded with food, medicines and hygiene supplies waiting in Egypt and in Jordan to be allowed into the enclave.

Urgent ceasefire call

She reiterated the UN’s calls for “a deal that would bring a ceasefire, that would release the hostages, that would bring in a standard flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza under the management of the United Nations, including UNRWA.”

Humanitarian operations in the enclave are being pushed into an “ever-shrinking space”, said World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Tarik Jašarević.

Briefing journalists in Geneva, he condemned three attacks on Monday on a building housing WHO staff in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza as well as the “mistreatment of those sheltering there and the destruction of its main warehouse”.

“Staff and their families, including children, were exposed to grave danger and traumatised after airstrikes caused a fire and significant damage,” Mr. Jašarević said, adding that Israeli military entered the premises, “forcing women and children to evacuate on foot” towards the coastal shelter of Al Mawasi amid active conflict. 

Screened at gunpoint

The WHO spokesperson said that staff and family members were “handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot and screened at gunpoint”. 

Two staff and two family members were detained and while three were later released, one WHO employee remains in detention for reasons unknown to the organization.

Mr. Jašarević called for the release of the detained staff member and insisted that “no one should be held without charges and without due process.”

The latest evacuation order for the area has impacted several WHO premises and compromised its presence on the ground, “crippling efforts to sustain a collapsing health system,” Mr. Jašarević added, and “pushing survival further out of reach for more than two million people”. 

The Israeli military operation in Deir Al-Balah on Monday also caused an explosion and fire inside WHO’s main warehouse, which is located within the evacuation zone in the central Gazan city, “part of a pattern of systematic destruction of health facilities”, the agency’s spokesperson said.

According to Gaza’s health authorities, since the start of the war in October 2023, some 1,500 health workers have been killed in the Strip. Some 94 per cent of all health facilities have been damaged and half of Gaza’s hospitals are “not functional at all”, Mr. Jašarević said. 

“The chance to prevent loss of lives and reverse immense damage to the health system slips further out of reach every day,” he stressed.

Visa denials 

Spotlighting further challenges to the humanitarian operation in Gaza, the WHO spokesperson pointed to an increase in the denial of visas by Israeli authorities for emergency medical teams seeking to enter the Strip since the breakdown of the latest ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on 18 March. 

He said that 58 international staff for the emergency medical teams, including surgeons and critical medical specialists, have been denied access.

UNRWA’s Ms. Touma highlighted the fact that ever since the agency’s Commissioner-General was denied entry to Gaza in March 2024, he has not been allowed back into the Strip. He has also not received a visa from Israel to enter the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, for more than a year. 

The UNRWA spokesperson also deplored the lack of access for international media to the enclave. 

“It certainly is time, if not long overdue, for international media to go into Gaza precisely to look into the facts and to help with reporting first-hand information on the horrors that people in Gaza are living through,” she said. 

Critical lifelines collapsing

UN humanitarians continue to highlight the rapid collapse of critical lifelines in Gaza amid ongoing hostilities.

Local authorities said more than a dozen children and adults died from hunger in the past 24 hours, UN aid coordination office, OCHA, reported on Tuesday.

“Hospitals have admitted people in a state of severe exhaustion caused by a lack of food, and others are said to be collapsing in the streets,” it said.

“This is on top of continued reports of people being shot, killed or injured while simply trying to find food – food that is only being allowed into Gaza in quantities that are far too small.”

Furthermore, in many cases where UN teams are permitted by Israel to collect supplies from closed compounds near border crossings, civilians approaching the trucks come under fire, despite repeated assurances that troops would not be present or engage.

OCHA said “this unacceptable pattern is the opposite of what facilitating humanitarian operations should look like,” underscoring that “absolutely no one should have to risk their life to get food.”