Source: United Nations (Video News)
Senior UNRWA official Scott Andersen reiterated the need for an enabling environment to bring in aid at scale for people in Gaza, “250 to 300 trucks a day in the south and 30 to 40 trucks a day in the north”, he said.
Scott Andersen, Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator and Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza spoke to reporter today (16 Oct) in New York.
Anderson told reporters that there are about 470,000 people still in the north of the Strip. There are about 170,000 people in the north primarily in Jabalia. Since September 30, only 12 trucks of food have made it to the population in the north. In the south of the Strip in the declared humanitarian zone, there are about 1.4 million people in a very small space.
The UNRWA official reiterated the need to have a corresponding number of trucks that come in from the private sector.
He said, “The things the UN doesn’t do that the private sector does very well. We don’t bring in fresh fruit and vegetables, we don’t bring in eggs, we don’t bring in meat, we don’t bring in a lot of things. We bring in large staple items. That’s our value added. And the value added for the private sectors, they do everything else, and they do it. They do it very well.”
As winter is approaching Gaza, a lot are needed to be done so the families are safe and protected, Andersen said.
He explained, “It’s just simple things like road repair, picking up garbage, distributing tents. But this all hinges on our ability to bring things in at the scale that’s needed. You need tarpaulin, you need tents, you need blankets for people, and mattresses and all the things that you would very much expect, as well as clothes.”
There has not been an importation for the commercial sector, the private sector close in a year, the Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator said, adding that “As all of you know, young children do not remain the same size. They change quite quickly at that age, and there needs to be a way for these kinds of things to be brought to the market or brought to people, so that children can be warm.”
The Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza also said, “We have 100,000 metric tons of food between the World Food Program and UNRWA awaiting to be imported into Gaza. That’s enough for everybody for three to four months.”
“So the supplies are there, and the willingness is there, the environment, unfortunately, is not there,” he added.
The UNRWA official continued, “we are coordinating closely with the IDF to try to create an environment. I’d hope we’d have a solution by now, but we’re not quite there, but I do think we’re very much at a tipping point in Gaza in terms of our ability to continue to fight off what would be the lurking man-made famine.”
Recalling his days in Gaza, Andersen said, “We do see on the ground, big numbers are easy to say, in September, a million people didn’t get food, right? And that sounds horrible. It’s much different when you talk to the actual family that didn’t get the food and they can’t feed their child, or they can’t feed everybody, and the mother or father has to choose which of them is not going to eat today, so their child can. That’s the real-world consequence that we see of not getting aid to people.”
The Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator reiterated that “Israel has a responsibility to provide security in Gaza, because they’re the only ones that are able to at the moment, and we need to find that solution. Like I said, winter is not far away.”
Moving onto education, Andersen said, “In primary age education, there are 625,000 children in Gaza that should be in school now. They’re about to miss their second year of education, between this and COVID, that’s four of the last five years. They’re not going to be in a school building, and are very concerned about a lost generation there.”
He concluded, “The one bright spot, I guess we could say, is we do have decent primary health care. UNRWA is doing about 17,000 consultations a day. We’re in round two of the polio vaccination campaign. We’ve added vitamin A to it this time to try to bolster the immune system for children. The first two days we’ve done just over 150,000 immunizations, we need to get to 560,000, it is what we did last time, and we’re trying to make sure that within the community there’s immunity across everyone for polio.”