PARIS: Humanitarian aid must be allowed into Gaza, where life is becoming “impossible” for the population, the Medecins Sans Frontieres charity urged on Friday.
On her return from southern Gaza, the organization’s president for France, Isabelle Defourny, said aid deliveries needed to be “sufficient to address the emergencies” suffered by the civilian population there.
“We have said again and again that the Gaza Strip has become uninhabitable, but now it’s becoming impossible to live there,” she said.
More than 2 million people were living “virtually outdoors,” she said, with only plastic sheets for cover.
“As cold weather approaches, this is going to go very badly,” she said, adding that current humanitarian aid had been “in no way sufficient.”
The comments came ahead of the first anniversary of Palestinian militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.
Ongoing Israeli bombardments and the continuing destruction of infrastructure had left formerly busy transport routes in ruins, Defourny said.
MSF called on Israel to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to allow aid and basic foodstuffs to get through, she said.
Cogat, an Israeli government agency, said this week that aid was getting into Gaza continuously, and more than a million tons had been delivered in total since the start of the war, but Defourny said this was still insufficient.
On Thursday, MSF had already reiterated its call for Israel to open “vital land borders” with Gaza.
In a statement, it also called for a “sustained ceasefire” and an immediate end “to the mass killing of civilians.”
