GENEVA: Gazans are forced to live in bombed-out buildings or camp next to giant piles of trash, a United Nations spokeswoman said, denouncing the "unbearable" conditions in the besieged territory.
Louise Wateridge from UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, described the "extremely dire" living conditions in the Gaza Strip.
"It's really unbearable," she told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from central Gaza.
Wateridge, who returned on Wednesday after four weeks outside the territory, said 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 said.
Nearly nine months into the war between Israel and Hamas, Wateridge said the Gaza Strip had been "destroyed".
She said she had been "shocked" on returning to Khan Yunis in central Gaza.
"The buildings are skeletons, if at all. Everything is rubble," she said. "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.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 37,700 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Gaza.
Wateridge said the struggle to bring fuel into Gaza and distribute it safely was having a knock-on impact on the ability to deliver aid.
About 150 metres away, she said, a pile of around 100,000 tonnes of waste was building up, with makeshift tents pitched all around it. "The population is living among it," she said. "With the temperatures rising, it's really adding misery to the living conditions."
Thursday saw the first medical evacuations from Gaza into neighbouring Egypt since the Rafah border crossing was closed in early May, when Israeli forces took over the Palestinian side.
Wateridge said one of her own UNRWA colleagues, Abdullah, had to wait for two months before being evacuated in April. He was injured in a strike and had his legs amputated in late February.
Since then, he had spent weeks in the devastated Al Shifa hospital -- once Gaza's largest medical complex -- when it was under siege.
And he spent two months waiting in a medical tent, "some days waiting for death", she said. "Multiple times, he very nearly lost his life."
Wateridge said that in late April, she visited Abdullah with a colleague who "donated her blood on the spot to him to keep him alive. — AFP
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