A worker for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees says the lack of humanity he’s witnessed in northern Gaza is “incomprehensible”.
Sam Rose says it is “essentially impossible” for UNRWA to provide any kind of assistance to civilians trapped in the north of the enclave amid constant Israeli military activity.
Mr Rose describes the scenes in Jabalia, where bakeries have run out of flour – the only food left in the area – and all eight water wells in the area have dried up.
“When we think that this conflict can’t get any worse, sadly, it has the ability to plummet further,” he tells Sky News.
“The lack of humanity that we’re seeing in northern Gaza is, quite frankly, incomprehensible and the inability of the world to do anything about it, equally so.”
The situation could be made even worse, Mr Rose says, if everybody in the north of Gaza cannot access a polio vaccine.
The World Health Organisation has vaccinated more than half a million Palestinian children but has been forced to postpone the final round of its polio vaccination campaign due to the escalating violence in northern Gaza.
This final phase of vaccines aimed to immunise 119,279 children across northern Gaza but relied on humanitarian pauses in fighting to ensure its completion.
The entire campaign could now be at risk if the final phase cannot be completed.
“If only part of the population is vaccinated, and vaccinated with live polio, then when that vaccine is shed into the water system, it can be picked up by other unvaccinated children,” adds Mr Rose.
“Over time, it mutates. And we’re dealing with a completely new strain of the condition against which nobody in Gaza is vaccinated.”