More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war broke out last year in 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 displaced in Gaza.
“We estimate that nine out of 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” he told journalists in New York and Geneva, speaking from Jerusalem.
“Before we estimated 1.7 (million), but since that number, we have had the operation in Rafah and we have had additional deployments 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 forced people to redefine their lives again and again.
“Behind these numbers, there are people… who have fears and complaints. And they probably had dreams and hopes; fewer and fewer, I fear today, unfortunately,” said De Domenico.
“People who for the last nine months have been moved around like pawns in a board game.”
He said the Gaza Strip had been split in two by Israel’s military operations, with OCHA estimating there were between 300,000 and 350,000 people living in the north of the besieged territory who could not go south.
However, he added that since the start of the war, around 110,000 people managed to leave the Gaza Strip before the closure of the Rafah crossing into Egypt at the beginning of May.
De Domenico said some remained in Egypt, while others moved on.
The bloodiest war ever in Gaza broke out after the Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP report based on Israeli figures.
The militants also captured 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, also mostly civilians, according to Health Ministry data in Hamas-controlled territory.
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