Gaza may already be ‘unlivable,’ UN official says

The Gaza Strip may already be “unlivable,” a United Nations official warns, after a decade of Hamas rule and a crippling Israeli blockade.

Robert Piper, the UN’s top humanitarian official in the West Bank and Gaza, tells AFP in an interview to mark a new report on living conditions in Gaza that all the “indicators are going in the wrong direction.”

“We predicted some years ago that Gaza would fast become unlivable on a host of indicators and that deadline is actually approaching even faster than we predicted — from health access, to energy to water,” he says. A 2012 UN report predicted the Palestinian enclave would be “unlivable” by 2020 if nothing was done to ease the blockade.

Piper points out that power supplies were down to as little as two hours a day in Gaza, where medical care had been slashed and youth unemployment was over 60 percent.

In such circumstances “for most of us that unlivability point has already been passed,” he says. “And yet somehow the Gazans soldier on.”

The new UN report, “Gaza — Ten Years Later,” also says more than 95% of Gaza’s water is now unfit for drinking.

— AFP