By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

“The way the military operations are conducted and the dramatic circumstances in which humanitarian aid is distributed create a very dramatic humanitarian situation.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has slammed Israel’s “chaotic” military campaign in the Gaza Strip and said the humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave is “a total disaster” with three aid convoys attacked over three consecutive days this week.

“It is a total disaster because it’s the combination of two things,” Guterres told a press briefing in New York on Thursday, pointing to a “chaotic” military campaign and the disproportionate humanitarian efforts in the enclave.

He said Israel’s military campaign “has the highest level of killing and destruction that I remember in any other military campaign since I am Secretary-General, anywhere in the world.”

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‘Total Lawlessness’

The secretary-general pointed out that the Israeli army’s campaign had a “chaotic nature” with people in the north first being attacked, then told “to go to the south”, then “the centre was attacked and people also told to go to the south.”

“But all of a sudden, they had to go back to the north, because apparently the problem was not solved. Then they went to the south, but all of a sudden, they went to the centre again, because also apparently the problem in the centre was not solved,” he continued.

“And anytime people were told to move to somewhere else and people were moving from place to place in search of a safety that doesn’t exist in any place.”

PALESTINIAN MEDIA: Two people were killed and several others were injured in an Israeli bombardment of a house in the Al-Sahaba neighborhood in central Gaza City.

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Guterres said there was a situation of “total lawlessness” in Gaza with “nobody” in charge of security anywhere in the enclave.

“We had in three successive days, three UN convoys that were hit by fire – on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday,” he said, adding that on Monday and Tuesday, the bullets “were shot by the Israeli military.”

“And let’s not also forget that our humanitarian appeal is only 36 per cent funded. So, the combination of these two factors, the way the military operations are conducted and the dramatic circumstances in which humanitarian aid is distributed create a very dramatic humanitarian situation.”

Netanyahu’s US Visit

Asked whether he had reached out to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the US, Guterres said he had not. However, “our people have been reaching out both to Israeli authorities and also to other countries, exactly in order to make sure that this kind of regrettable incidents are not repeated.”

The secretary-general said Netanyahu had said “nothing” that was new in his speech to the US Congress on Wednesday, stressing that the “two-state solution” was the “only possible long-term solution for peace in the region.”

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Asked for his evaluation of Netanyahu’s claims about the number of casualties in Gaza, Guterres said: “My answer is simple. To whom people believe in relation to that, I am very at ease in relation to this question.”

Netanyahu has faced a wave of protests since arriving in Washington on Monday.

Thousands took to the streets to protest his address to Congress and his policies in Gaza, demanding a ceasefire and for Netanyahu to be arrested.

Staggering Death Toll

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza which began last October.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 39,145 Palestinians have been killed, and 90,257 wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

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Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety.

(PC, Anadolu)