In mid -January, Israel and Hamas agreed to the ceasefire, which led to a temporary stop of the war in Gaza, which began after the October 7, 2023 attacks, which killed more than fifty thousand Palestinians. (The joint Israeli death of the Hamas attack and the war that followed about three thousand people. The humanitarian situation improved during the ceasefire, but in early March, Israel completely suspended the aid and conversed to extend the ceasefire. Since then, the fighting has resumed on a large scale, and the amount of food and medicine that remains in Gaza is insufficient to the needs of its people.
I recently spoken on the phone with Luiz Watergings, chief emergency officer at the United Nations Refugee and Business Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Wateridge left Gaza in December 2024, and UNRWAInternational employees were not allowed to return to the region for several months. (Last year, the Israeli government approved two projects, and entered into force in January, which prevents the Israeli government together from communicating with it. UNRWAPrevented UNRWA From work in Israel or the occupied lands. UNRWALocal employees are trying to continue their work). I wanted to understand what changed on the ground during the ceasefire, and what the new reality faced since the end. During our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how relief workers are trying to move UNRWA The Israeli government may mean handing over aid to move forward, and how the Gazan community will continue to defect when people become increasingly desperate hunger.
How to describe the current moment – this period after the end of the ceasefire?
From today, I think it is safe to say that all the progress made during the ceasefire was reversed. It has now passed exactly two months, starting on Friday, on May 2, that there was no supplies to enter the Gaza Strip. This is not only human supplies – this is all supplies. This commercial supply, this fuel, it’s food, it is a drug. It’s all at all. Nothing entered the Gaza tape for two months.
You can see, for consecutive weeks, the achievements made when the ceasefire was valid. UNRWA He was able to feed all the population during the ceasefire. We have provided non-nutrients-so these shelter elements, hygiene tools, and such things-to five hundred thousand people. The accomplishments of colleagues on the ground were at all end because we were able to perform our jobs. The situation now goes beyond imagination, so it is beyond words at this stage, because people are starving mainly, mainly. These options are made to prevent supplies from entering. It has been for a long time for two months. When we talk to our colleagues, when we talk to people in Gaza, children are now starving. People survive one meal a day. People without medicine.
I just want to back down for one second, and understand what was happening during the ceasefire. We used to hear about the inability to obtain goods across the border, and about the problems of distributing goods inside Gaza before the ceasefire. So what has changed in that period?
The difference was access, really. We spent more than a year, from October 7, 2023, until January, 2025, with a humanitarian response that was strangled in every way. Our facilities were exposed. They were affected. I spent hours, I could not tell you the number of hours, and sit in caravans waiting for aid to provide people, pending the move, pending access to access and criticism, being removed. I was on the back of this time last year, on the ground before the military operations. There were 1.4 million people there, then the chaos was. But during the ceasefire, we had bulldozers and machines that were delivered. The food has been delivered. The looting situation diminished because people have what they need. We were able to provide services and provide aid to people in all areas of the Gaza Strip, and this was not the case before the ceasefire. This has already happened overnight.
What do you mean by reaching? Can you talk more about it?
For the best part of the year, you will talk to doctors in hospitals, and they were saying, “We always have enough fuel for about three days.” On the first day they will have fuel. This is the operation of generators, to run incubators, to keep children alive. Machinery, air conditioning in the intensive care unit units, everything that runs the hospital was working on these fuel generators. So on the first day they will have everything. On the second day, they will have to start turning off machines, which stops air conditioning. Flies will enter the intensive care unit because they will have to open the windows because there was no air conditioning. On the third day, they had to start closing the machines, then there would be enough fuel again, because only more would come.
People had enough to eat, perhaps this week, but what happens next week? So access to the supplies that changed. We had thousands of trucks entering during the ceasefire, and this is something that we never saw before the ceasefire. Before a ceasefire, we may sometimes get fifty trucks or so on a day. Many of them were looting because the population was very desperate. So we moved from this type of number to more than four thousand trucks per week during the ceasefire. People were also getting tents. Everything has just changed.
But it was also the arrival we had inside the Gaza Strip. There were areas that we had not seen for months. It was one of them. Our employees were able to return to their homes in Rafah. We were able to reach the facilities that we have not seen in a row because we are depriving us from reaching. We were able to restore some health centers. We managed to fix some of these facilities, use them again as health centers, and use them as shelters.
The same was true in Gabalia. At the end of last year, we had a complete and comprehensive siege of Japali. After the ceasefire, we managed to reach these areas. We were able to find people. People were able to go home. Unfortunately, people were able to return to these buildings where they were and dug their relatives. Many of the people I know and many of our colleagues, the first thing they did in the ceasefire was to return to their homes to actually dig and find their families that were still under the rubble – some of them were for weeks, some for a year – and buried them and have a kind of dignity in downloading and putting those lives. This is the situation we had in the ceasefire. And now all this has lost. We also started to educate more than fifty thousand children again, but this was severely affected.
When I spoke to you and the other relief worker in the first year of the war, you will say that aid was always insufficient, but it was rarely zero. What was required is five hundred trucks per day, but instead it will be a hundred or it will be two hundred or will be seventy -five to enter it. But what is happening now-zero trucks-worse in a remarkable way.
