The United Nations has decided that on Monday 13 November, 2023 its flag will be lowered half-mast to pay tribute to UNRWA colleagues who have lost their lives to the conflict between the Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
This was disclosed during the Press Briefing on Thursday at the UN Headquarter in United States through the Spokesman asking its offices around the world to do so on same day and observe a minute of silence for them.
The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA Commissioner-General, Phillippe Lazzarini said it’s a painful month to the Agency losing 99 of his colleagues who have been killed in Gaza, says the highest number of UN aid workers killed in a conflict in such a short time.
The Commissioner- General who made this known at the International Conference on Gaza in Paris, France on Thursday revealed that these colleagues are among the 10,000 people killed since the beginning of the war, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
He added that more than 700,000 displaced people live in similar degrading conditions in 150 UNRWA schools and buildings across the Gaza Strip. “Our shelters overcrowded, with little food, water, or privacy”.
He pressed further that outside the shelters, entire neighborhoods have been leveled, extinguishing countless lives, hopes and dreams adding that hospitals, churches, mosques, bakeries and UNRWA schools have not been spared.
UNRWA chief grieved that thousands of children killed cannot be “collateral damage” and pushing a million people from their homes and concentrating them in areas without adequate infrastructure is forced displacement.
He said condemning the horrendous massacre committed by Hamas in Israel is the right thing to do. “The UN has done so and continues to call for hostages to be released”.
According to him, “This cannot, however, justify a war that disregards international humanitarian law and promotes dehumanizing rhetoric.
“References to Palestinians as (I quote) “terrorists”, “human animals” and “people to be erased” are unconscionable while the demonstration of a startling lack of empathy”, said the UNRWA Chief.