UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said today that he was concerned about the possible spread of the Gaza war across the region, including the West Bank, despite the fact that aid agencies are adequately preparing for this eventuality.

The UN official warned that a spread to Lebanonof Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, will be “possibly an apocalypse scene.”

“I see this as the spark that will ignite the tension. It will potentially be an apocalypse,” Martin Griffiths, whose term ends at the end of the month, warned reporters from Geneva.

The potential consequences are “unpredictable,” he added.

A conflict involving Lebanon “will reach Syria… it will also reach other” territories in the region, he said.

“This will obviously have consequences in Gaza, and it will obviously have an impact on the West Bank,” he said. “It’s very worrying.”

Since the war in Gaza broke out nine months ago “it has shown us a new degree of tragedy and brutality,” he added.

“However we all feared that this might be the beginning.”

The war in the Gaza Strip, which erupted after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, has led to violent incidents on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where there are almost daily exchanges of fire between Hezbollah, an ally of the Palestinian Islamist movement, and the Israeli army.

The West Bank, where the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority exercises limited rule under Israeli occupation, has already seen its worst unrest in decades alongside the war in Gaza, a territory controlled by Hamas.

Hezbollah opened the front with Lebanon in a show of support for Hamas a day after the Palestinian movement’s October 7 attack on southern Israel killed 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Of the 251 people abducted during the attack, 116 are still being held hostage, of whom 42 are dead, according to the military.

In retaliation, Israel launched an attack on the Gaza Strip, which has so far killed 37,718 people, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-controlled government’s health ministry.