UN: No safe place for Gaza civilians

GENEVA: Palestinian civilians in densely-populated Gaza have no place to hide from Israel’s military offensive and children are paying the heaviest price, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Israel pounded targets across the Gaza Strip, saying no cease-fire was near as US and UN diplomats pursued talks on halting fighting that has claimed more than 600 lives as the conflict entered its third week. “There is literally no safe place for civilians,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told a news briefing in Geneva. The death toll is rising in the coastal enclave which has an estimated 4,500 people per square km, he said. The priority for aid agencies was protecting civilians and evacuating and treating the wounded. Nearly 500 homes have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes and 100,000 people have sought shelter in schools of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), where they need food, water and mattresses, he said. “This number continues to increase by the hour,” UNRWA said in a statement on Tuesday, raising its emergency funding appeal to $115 million from $60 million. The overwhelming majority of people killed so far in the conflict are Palestinians, including 121 Gaza children under age 18, Juliette Touma of the UNICEF said. “According to an assessment by aid workers on ground at least 107,000 children need psycho-social support for the trauma they are experiencing such as death, injury or loss of their homes,” Laerke said. More than 1.2 million of the 1.8 million people in the enclave have no water or only limited access to water as power networks have been damaged or lack fuel for generators, he said. “In addition, we do have reports of sewage flooding which is a threat to public health,” Laerke said. The UN’s World Food Programme has distributed emergency food rations and food vouchers to more than 90,000 people so far, spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said. “Ready to eat food stocks are running low in Gaza given the conflict has lasted two weeks and the needs are increasing,” she said. Food will be bought locally and also airlifted from Dubai. The World Health Organization (WHO) said that 18 health facilities in Gaza have been damaged, including three hospitals. Meanwhile, About 1,000 Palestinian Muslims fleeing Israeli shells devastating their Gaza neighborhood have found shelter in a building they otherwise would rarely if ever enter, the city’s 12th-century Greek Orthodox Church. Despite its thick walls dating back to the Crusades, the Church of Saint Porphyrius was still not a very safe haven. Shortly after they arrived, Israeli aircraft bombed a nearby field, spraying shrapnel on the church and damaging graves. But children from the Shejaia district were busy playing football in the yard on Tuesday. Their mothers watched on mattresses and plastic chairs provided by the church, along with food, blankets and toys. “We have opened the church in order to help people. This is the duty of the church and we are doing all we can to help them,” Archbishop Alexios told Reuters as the sounds of small children echoed outside his office at the church. “At the beginning there were 600 people and today they became a thousand — mostly children and women. Some of those children are a week old,” said the head of Gaza’s Greek Orthodox minority, the largest of the Christian communities here. Only about 1,400 Christians — Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants — live among the 1.8 million Muslims. “The mosque nearby and the neighbors of the church are all helping. We are still in need of mattresses, blankets, food and most important is petrol, as we suffer blackouts. If there is no electricity we cannot have water also,” said the archbishop. Source: Arab News