The UN agency for Palestinian refugees or UNRWA says more than 100 of its staff have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the Israeli-Hamas war on October 7.
"Devastated. Over 100 UNRWA colleagues confirmed killed in 1 month. Parents, teachers, nurses, doctors, (and) support staff," UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said on X on Friday.
"UNRWA is mourning, Palestinians mourning, Israelis mourning. Ending this tragedy needs Humanitarian cease-fire now," he added.
Earlier on Thursday, Lazzarini told the International Humanitarian Conference for Civilians in Gaza in Paris: "The past month was painful for UNRWA."
Not collateral damage
He said: "99 of my male and female colleagues were killed in Gaza. This is by far the largest number of United Nations relief workers killed in a conflict in such a short time."
He noted that they are among 10,000 people killed since the beginning of the war, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.
"The killing of thousands of children (in Gaza) cannot be collateral damage,” he said.
Lazzarini added that pushing a million people to leave their homes and concentrating them in areas that lack adequate infrastructure constitutes “forced displacement” and that severely restricting food, water and medicine is “collective punishment.”
He said "the Israeli military incursion and settler violence in the West Bank caused a record rise in the number of Palestinian deaths."
Threat to health
On his visit to Gaz a last week, he said: “For the first time since the start of the war, I visited an UNRWA school that houses thousands of people, and it was a sad and heartbreaking situation.”
"Children are used to learning and laughing in this school, but today they are begging for a piece of bread and a sip of water."
Lazzarini said that "more than 700,000 displaced people live in similar humiliating conditions inside 150 UNRWA schools and buildings across the Gaza Strip ... Our shelters are overcrowded, with little food, water or privacy."
“The appalling sanitary conditions represent a loo ming threat to public health,” he added.
