NGOs are ready to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, although they fear obstacles

In this densely populated territory, where almost 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once by war, aid workers fear that aid will not be enough to meet the population’s needs.

“Everything has been destroyed, children are on the streets, we cannot be satisfied with a single priority,” Amande Bazerolle, coordinator of the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told AFP, speaking by phone from Gaza.

“Everyone is exhausted, including local humanitarian workers, who have been working tirelessly for 15 months, before being displaced,” said Mohamed Jatib, deputy director of operations for the organization Medical Aid for Palestine in Gaza, in Khan Yunis.

In makeshift shelters set up in schools, bombed-out houses and cemeteries, hundreds of thousands of people do not have “plastic tarpaulins” to protect themselves from the elements, Gavin Kelleher, from the Norwegian Refugee Council (CNR), told AFP.

Your organization will have to focus especially on providing “tarps, ropes and equipment to cover holes” in the shelters. “At least until we stop seeing children dying of hypothermia,” he declared, speaking from Gaza.

Last week, hypothermia killed at least eight people, four of them newborns, three babies and one adult, in central and southern Gaza, according to a report by the Hamas Health Ministry, used by the World Health Organization.