New York – Ma’an – The UN Security Council held a meeting on Wednesday evening at the request of Algeria and Slovenia, during which it discussed the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli war of extermination enters its second year. It also heard testimony from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
‘After a year of profound suffering and loss, Gaza is an unrecognizable place, a graveyard for tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children,’ said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini. ‘A sea of ??rubble has replaced the former streets, with almost all residents now displaced.’
The recent Israeli aggression in the north is “particularly worrying,” he continued, as there is nowhere safe to go. In the south, living conditions have become unbearable as Gaza once again teeters “on the brink of man-made famine.”
After two years of depriving children of education
, Gaza ‘cannot afford to lose an entire generation,’ Lazzarini said, which is why the agency has resumed some education programmes alongside its life-saving operations. Lazzarini warned of dire consequences if the Israeli bills to shut down UNRWA are adopted.
Legally, Lazzarini says, this legislation defies the will of the international community expressed through General Assembly Resolution 302 on UNRWA, and deepens violations recognized by the International Court of Justice.
Politically, the ‘anti-UNRWA legislation,’ which is part of a broader campaign to dismantle the agency, seeks to ‘strip Palestinians of their refugee status and unilaterally change the parameters of a future political solution.’
He noted that ‘senior Israeli officials have described the elimination of UNRWA as a war objective.’ He warned that failure to address attempts to intimidate and undermine the United Nations in the occupied Palestinian territory would ultimately jeopardize humanitarian work and human rights around the world.
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This Council must decide how far it will tolerate actions that undermine the very essence of multilateralism and threaten international peace and security,’ he added. ‘I urge you to protect this UN agency from efforts to terminate its mandate, arbitrarily and prematurely, in the absence of a long-promised political solution.’
He stressed that this impunity requires a decisive response: ‘Or we can admit that the rules-based international order after World War II is over.’
Source: Maan News Agency
