Senior WHO official claims Gazans reduced to drinking sewage water

The regional director of the World Health Organization claims that some Gazans are drinking sewage as well as eating animal feed due to famine-like conditions in the Strip.

“There are people who are now eating animal food, eating grass, they’re drinking sewage water,” says Hanan Balkhy. “Children are barely able to eat, while the trucks are standing outside of Rafah.”

She urges Israel to “open those borders,” though closures at the Rafah border crossing have been attributed to Egypt.

Shimon Freedman, a spokesperson for COGAT, the Defense Ministry unit responsible for coordinating the aid transfers, tells The Times of Israel on Tuesday that in the week beginning on May 26, it facilitated 229 “coordinations” for the movement of humanitarian aid in Gaza, meaning operations to enable the collection and delivery of aid from the crossing points to their destinations within the territory. Each coordination typically involves multiple trucks moving in a convoy, Freedman says.

He says Israel had increased the manpower for facilitating the transfer of goods, added inspection machinery at the goods crossings, and thereby increased the capacity of what can be transferred into Gaza every day.

And he accuses UN agencies of failing to do likewise.

According to COGAT, 5,258 trucks entered Gaza through Kerem Shalom and Erez in the north in May, the highest tally for any month since the war began. The UN humanitarian agency OCHA says aid from 2,790 trucks were distributed in Gaza in May.

OCHA says access constraints “continue to undermine the safe delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.” Conditions “further deteriorated” in May it claims.