Food, water, sanitation and other basic needs are in unprecedented short supply for over one million Palestinians who have fled across the Gaza Strip to the territory’s southern city of Rafah, a UN special rapporteur has told Anadolu.
“More than one million people are concentrated in Rafah, having fled from other parts of Gaza. They are lacking very seriously in the basic necessities of life, from food and water and sanitation with the threat of diseases beyond anything that we have seen in any conflict in recent decades around the world, severe as those conflicts were,” explained Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing. “You never had a situation where a population was not even allowed to flee.”
Rajagopal pointed out that even Israel does not know where these people are expected to go, recalling many statements from sources within Israel indicating “a desire to expel them entirely from Gaza.”
Pointing to serious claims that top Israeli officials and other leaders are planning to eliminate the Palestinian population of Gaza, Rajagopal emphasised that these claims, viewed by some as “rantings of random people within Israel” cannot be ignored.
“Unfortunately, everything that we thought was not possible is becoming more and more possible by the day. We have to judge the actions of Israel not by what they say, but by what actually happens. What’s happening is that people have been displaced multiple times, and they have been concentrated in Rafah. They’re being bombed now.”
Underlining how UN rapporteurs have written numerous reports on the “genocidal” dimension of Israel’s attacks in Gaza, Rajagopal noted that they mentioned a “serious risk of genocide” in their initial report. He added that they published another report that included the possibility of ongoing genocidal acts, stating: “Since then, we have confirmed that in fact. What’s happening in Gaza constitutes genocide.”