Gazans living in ‘unbearable’ conditions — UNRWA

Gazans are forced to live in bombed-out buildings or camp next to giant piles of trash, a United Nations spokeswoman says, denouncing the “unbearable” conditions in the besieged territory.

Louise Wateridge from UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, describes the “extremely dire” living conditions in the Gaza Strip.

“It’s really unbearable,” she tells reporters in Geneva, via video-link from central Gaza.

Wateridge, who returned Wednesday after four weeks outside the territory, says that even in that time the situation had “significantly deteriorated.”

“Today, it has to be the worst it’s ever been. I don’t doubt that tomorrow again will be the worst it’s ever been,” she says.

Nearly nine months into the war between the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, Wateridge says the Gaza Strip had been “destroyed.”

She says she had been “shocked” on returning to Khan Yunis in central Gaza.

“The buildings are skeletons, if at all. Everything is rubble,” she says.

“And yet people are living there again.”

“There’s no water there, there’s no sanitation, there’s no food. And now, people are living back in these buildings that are empty shells,” with sheets covering the gaps left by blown-out walls.

With no bathrooms, “people are relieving themselves anywhere they can.”