By Anadolu staff
GAZA CITY, Palestine (AA) – The UN humanitarian office warned Tuesday that the Gaza Strip will “bleed to death” amid the denial of humanitarian access to the Palestinian enclave.
''The recurrent denial of access of humanitarian teams to northern Gaza is preventing the needed scale-up of life-saving operations,'' Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in a statement.
''Today was the first time that we managed to reach Al-Shifa Hospital after five days of denied and aborted missions,'' she added.
''Equipment, fuel, water and food are all in very short supply,” the spokesperson said. ''The doctors told us stories today of incredible courage of people's strength and resilience and the suffering we saw coming here is unimaginable.”
She cited a doctor in Al-Shifa Hospital as saying ''we are so alone in this world; they have forgotten us. The world must not grow numb to the suffering of the people in Gaza.”
''Unless we are enabled to with safe, meaningful and sustained access to these areas, Gaza will simply bleed out,” Cherevko.
Israel has mounted a deadly offensive on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas which Tel Aviv says killed 1,200 people.
At least 25,490 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and 63,354 injured, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The Israeli onslaught has left 85% of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
*Writing by Mohammad Sio