In a post on his X account, Lazzarini offered a glimpse of the harsh reality each woman and girl faces during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said on Thursday that women and girls in the Gaza Strip face “deepening dehumanization” due to the ten-month-old war.
In a post on his X account, Lazzarini offered a glimpse of the harsh reality each woman and girl faces during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
“Women & girls can often spend months without taking a shower, going through several menstrual cycles without washing up. They have to cut their hair very short due to lice, lack of shampoo, not enough water or combs,” he wrote.
The UNRWA commissioner-general stressed that many women in the Strip are deprived of the feeling of safety, privacy or dignity due to their living conditions in overcrowded shelters and displacement centers.
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The psychological effect goes hand in hand with the overall health status of women and girls living under the raging war during the last ten months. According to Lazzarini, women and girls in Gaza “skip going to the toilet and therefore avoid eating or drinking water.”
Lazzarini also stressed the difficulty women and girls face in regard to their personal hygiene. “Some women have been wearing the same head scarf for the past 10 months,” he wrote.
He emphasized that women in Gaza are telling their teams that they are struggling to see themselves as women. Lazzarini quoted one woman as saying; “I don’t feel I’m a woman anymore” and labeled this as another aspect of the deepening dehumanization of this war.
He ended his post by requesting “a ceasefire for every girl and woman in Gaza to restore some of their dignity.”
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Ongoing Genocide
Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.
Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 40,005 Palestinians have been killed, and 92,401 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
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’.
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)
