More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war broke out last October.
Geneva:
About nine in 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been displaced at least once since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, the UN humanitarian agency said on Wednesday.
Andrea De Domenico, head of the United Nations OCHA agency in the Palestinian territories, said around 1.9 million people are expected to be displaced in Gaza.
“We estimate that nine out of 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not 10 times, since October,” he told reporters in New York and Geneva from Jerusalem.
“Previously we estimated 1.7 (million) but since that number we had the operation in Rafah and we had additional displacement from Rafah,” he said, explaining the increase.
“Then we also had operations in the north that also moved people,” he added.
He said such military operations had forced people to reset their lives again and again.
“Behind these figures are people… who have fears and grievances. And they probably had dreams and hopes; the less I fear today, unfortunately,” De Domenico said.
“People who have been moved around like pawns in a board game over the past nine months.”
He said the Gaza Strip had been divided in two by Israel’s military operations, with OCHA estimating that 300,000 to 350,000 people lived in the north of the besieged area and could not go south.
Meanwhile, he added that since the start of the war, an estimated 110,000 people managed to leave the Gaza Strip before the Rafah crossing into Egypt was closed in early May.
De Domenico said some had remained in Egypt, while others had since moved on.
The bloodiest Gaza war ever broke out after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 who the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has since killed at least 37,953 people, mostly civilians, according to Health Ministry data in the Hamas-held area.
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