LARGE swathes of Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank have been completely destroyed following a series of controlled detonations by the Israeli security forces (ISF), the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said.
UNRWA’s communications director Juliette Touma told reporters in Geneva that all 30,000 residents have left the camp as of Tuesday morning.
Speaking from Amman, she described catastrophic scenes, with some 100 buildings “destroyed or heavily damaged” by the detonations. The camp’s residents had “endured the impossible”, she added.
“The detonation on Sunday was when children were supposed to go back to school,” Ms Touma explained, adding that the 13 UNRWA schools in the camp and its surrounding areas remain closed, depriving 5,000 children of education.
UNRWA faces unprecedented challenges to carry out its work following the Israeli parliament’s adoption in October last year of two laws banning its operations in Israeli territory and prohibiting Israeli authorities from having any contact with the agency. The Knesset laws came into force last Thursday.
Still, Ms. Touma said that to this day, the Government of Israel has “not communicated to UNRWA how they intend to implement” the laws.
The agency’s teams are “staying and delivering” in the remaining parts of the West Bank, Ms Touma said, where “services, including primary healthcare and education, are ongoing”.
“Schools and clinics remain open, including in occupied East Jerusalem, providing services to refugees,” the UNRWA spokesperson said. “We are seeing attendance at UNRWA schools at over 80 to 85 per cent.”
Ms Touma also reported a “steady increase” in the number of patients visiting the UNRWA health centres in the West Bank, with one clinic in East Jerusalem recording more than 400 patients a day.
Turning to the Gaza Strip, where humanitarian needs are sky-high, Ms Touma said that the “biggest priority” for UNRWA teams there is distributing supplies from thousands of aid trucks that have come in since the start of the ceasefire on 19 January.
The Gaza Strip is in the first phase of the temporary truce between Israel and Hamas. The development followed over 15 months of war in which some 46,000 Palestinians were killed, according to the Gaza health authorities. The conflict was sparked by the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage.
Ms Touma welcomed the massive increase in aid following the ceasefire and highlighted the urgency of getting food, fuel and medical supplies to those in need, “especially in northern Gaza”, where the UN estimates that more than 545,000 people have arrived from the south of the enclave over the past week.
The UNRWA spokesperson also reiterated calls for reducing dependency on humanitarian assistance, advocating for a “flow of commercial supplies” into the Strip.
Ms. Touma stressed that UNRWA has brought in 60 per cent of all supplies that came into Gaza since the ceasefire began and that the “vast majority” of the aid is distributed by the agency. This is “for a very simple reason,” she said, “because of the footprint, the number of people that we have on the ground in Gaza: over 5,000”.
A fifth of them are health workers, Ms Touma added, underscoring UNRWA’s major role as a primary healthcare provider in the enclave with an average of 17,000 daily consultations.
Following the Knesset ban, UN chief António Guterres and the heads of many UN agencies have insisted that UNRWA is irreplaceable in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Besides obstacles stemming from the new Israeli legislation, the agency’s operations are also constantly in jeopardy because of its “very bad” financial health, Ms. Touma said. The United States, notably, had stopped funding UNRWA as of January 2024.
The UNRWA spokesperson said that the agency was able to pay salaries to its workers last month but had limited visibility over its financial situation, calling the funding crisis “endemic”. – UN Multimedia Newsroom
