“Attacking Rafa would actually mean severing a vital connection with people who have lost everything but their lives,” said the executive director of the US branch of Doctors Without Borders.
An army ground attack on Rafah would turn this town in the southern Gaza Strip into a vast “cemetery”, the head of the US branch of the non-governmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned on Tuesday, warning along with other NGOs that it would also increase the risk of famine in the Palestinian enclave.
“The consequences of a large-scale attack on Rafah will be truly unimaginable,” MSF US executive director Avril Benoit said during a digitally-broadcast press conference also attended by representatives of the non-governmental organizations Oxfam, Refugees International and International Amnesty.
“If there is a military attack on this site, it will turn it into a graveyard,” she said, referring to Rafah, on the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, on the closed border with Egypt, where an estimated one and a half million people have taken refuge. UN.
“That is where the last remaining health and humanitarian services for the people of Gaza are concentrated,” Ms Benoit added. “Attacking Rafa would actually mean cutting a vital link to people who have lost everything but their lives.”
Relentless Israeli shelling of the Palestinian enclave has made it “almost impossible” to distribute humanitarian aid, Jeremy Konaidyk, the president of the NGO Refugees International, said.
“The danger, if a large humanitarian operation is not allowed, unhindered in the entire Gaza Strip, is that famine will set in,” he added. This danger arises “not because of any natural phenomenon”, but because of “the refusal, permanent and deliberate, above all by the government of Israel, to allow humanitarian access”, he stressed.
Avril Benoit once again called for a ceasefire, which is “the only solution to avoid new deaths and new suffering in Gaza”, on the day the US vetoed — for the third time since October 7 — a draft resolution of the UN Security Council calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
International organizations and NGOs have been raising the alarm in recent days about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, besieged and largely leveled after twenty weeks of war, where 2.2 million people are facing the threat of starvation, as the UN does not stop warning.
Source :Skai
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