UN envoy warns Gaza on verge of ‘full collapse’

A senior United Nations official on Tuesday warned the Palestinian coastal enclave of the Gaza Strip was on the verge of “full collapse.”

UN Middle East peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov said a key to saving Gaza from disaster was restoring the government of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to power there, a decade after it was forced out by the Islamist terror group Hamas.

“Without that Gaza risks exploding in our face again, this time in a far more deadly and violent manner than in the past,” Mladenov said at the annual conference of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

Repeated reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah — the party that dominates the Palestinian Authority — have failed to reach an agreement that would return control of Gaza to the PA, most recently because Hamas refused to surrender its considerable arsenal of weapons and military infrastructure.

Earlier this month, the White House froze around $100 million in contributions to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees after the Palestinians announced they would no longer accept the US as a mediator in peace talks with Israel. The Palestinians were angered after US President Donald Trump on December 6 recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, though he stressed that he was not specifying the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in the city, and called for no change in the status quo at the city’s holy sites.

“I often say publicly, in (UN) Security Council briefings and in other formats, that we are in the midst of a major humanitarian crisis,” Mladenov said.

“Let me be very clear today here, that we’re well beyond that,” he added.

“We’re on the verge of a total systems failure in Gaza, with a full collapse of the economy, with social services, political, humanitarian and security implications stemming from that.”

Mladenov said he would raise those concerns in Brussels on Wednesday at a meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates international donor support for the Palestinians.

He said the meeting would be at a high level with representatives of the Israelis, Palestinians and “a number” of Arab foreign ministers attending.

PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah will take part, a Palestinian Authority statement said. Hamdallah is set to meet with Israel’s Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon in Jerusalem on Sunday in what will be the first high-level meeting of Israeli and Palestinian officials since the US policy move on the capital.

“One of our key messages must really be: what can we actually do to create and preserve hope for the people of Gaza, in order to address both the militant aspect of it and the humanitarian aspect?” Mladenov said.

Since Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to engage in American-led peace talks, saying the US is not an honest broker. He has also refused to meet with senior White House officials, including US Vice President Mike Pence, and in a speech earlier this month he denounced a peace plan being formulated by the US as the “slap of the century.”