Here in the UK, Foreign Secretary David Cameron is understood to have lost patience at the lack of aid making its way into Gaza. One source close to the former PM said he believes the government may have jumped the gun in withdrawing funding.
Lazzirni says Britain and its allies acted out of “domestic considerations, pressure and perceptions” – in other words, politics.
There is a realisation sinking in among the West that, at least for the immediate future, there is no alternative to UNRWA as suffering in the Strip intensifies. If we want aid delivered, Lord Cameron said on Tuesday, “UNRWA is the only body with a distribution network”.
Israel argues otherwise. It has repeatedly accused the agency of failing to distribute the abundance of aid it claims to be delivering to the enclave, saying “more food trucks are now entering into the Gaza Strip than before the war”.
Lazzirni dismisses such claims. He says truck numbers are down by roughly 500 a day from before the war and aid convoys are facing “extraordinary bureaucratic inspections,” which can delay delivery by “an average of six to seven days”.
That the US has pledged to construct a port in Gaza to get more aid into the territory, circumventing the Israelis in the process, is indicative of the dire and desperate situation, as evidenced by the recent shootings of dozens of civilians as they attempted to intercept an aid convoy in the north.
Lazzirni adds that humanitarian agencies are also facing tight restrictions on so-called “dual use items” – any item which the Israelis believe could serve a different purpose. According to a recent CNN investigation, everything from oxygen cylinders, anaesthetics and crutches have been denied entry into the Strip.
Despite such claims and counter-claims, denials, and mud-slinging, it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore the horrors unfolding in Gaza: more than 30,000 are dead; 70 per cent of housing stock has been destroyed; and disease, starvation and dehydration are rife.
That children are now dying from malnutrition, as confirmed on Wednesday by the UN, is especially hard to fathom.
This week, footage circulated of an emaciated 12-year-old boy with cerebral palsy at a Gazan hospital. His eyes were sunken deep into his skull, the skin stretched thin and taut across his face. His fingers were nothing but bone, frail and paper-like.
It’s the normalisation of these types of scenes which truly terrifies Lazzirini.
“It is shocking … I did not expect the level of dehumanisation, how easily we have equated Gaza to Hamas, Gazans to Hamas, children to Hamas,” he says. “And because this was equated, you start to justify the unjustifiable.”
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