OCHA: Suffering mounts in Gaza amid ongoing hostilities, constraints on aid operations

23 June 2025

OCHA warns that conditions in the Gaza Strip are deteriorating rapidly. Scores of people of all ages are being killed and injured every day, while humanitarian operations of sufficient scale are not facilitated, leaving unaddressed the critical needs of those who have so far survived.

Yesterday, OCHA’s Head of Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Jonathan Whittall – who is currently in Gaza – briefed journalists about what he was seeing there. He warned of a pattern where people are being killed trying to reach food, noting he had met some of those injured in such circumstances in a visit to Nasser hospital.

“What we are seeing is carnage,” Whittall said. “It is weaponized hunger. It is forced displacement. It’s a death sentence for people just trying to survive. All combined, it appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life from Gaza.”

At the same time, he reiterated that the UN and its partners have a humanitarian plan by which they could reach every family in Gaza, as they have in the past, but they are prevented from doing so.

Over the weekend, telecommunications were restored across Gaza, after damaged fibre cables were repaired. For the first time in days, humanitarian teams have had more than 24 hours of relatively stable connectivity – something that is essential to coordinate emergency relief and save lives.

However, humanitarians in Gaza warn that without urgent fuel deliveries, telecommunications will go down again very soon.

Fuel is also needed to keep emergency rooms running, power ambulances, and operate water desalination and pumping stations.

Right now, teams on the ground are rationing what little fuel remains and working to retrieve stocks stored inside Gaza, in areas that are hard to reach. Earlier today, one of these teams managed to access fuel stored in Rafah.

If that mission is completed successfully, it would buy critical services a bit more time, although not much. OCHA stresses that the Israeli authorities need to facilitate movements of fuel in sufficient quantities into and throughout Gaza, including to and within the north, where fuel movements have often been denied.

Most of Gaza is in areas where humanitarian teams are required to coordinate every movement with the Israeli authorities. On Saturday and Sunday, the UN and its partners attempted to coordinate 16 humanitarian movements, but half of them were denied outright, hindering the trucking of water and fuel, the provision of nutrition services, and the retrieval of bodies. Some efforts to remove solid waste and the movement of staff within Gaza, without delivering supplies, were facilitated.

Meanwhile, most of Gaza also remains under displacement orders. Just today, Israeli authorities issued another such directive, this time for two neighbourhoods in Khan Younis city, citing Palestinian rocket fire from these areas. These neighbourhoods were already subject to earlier displacement orders and include two hospitals – Al Amal and Nasser. While Israeli authorities have clarified that the hospitals are not required to evacuate, OCHA says the designation is nonetheless hindering access to those critical facilities for both patients and medical staff.

Access to Nasser Medical Complex has been challenging because there is not enough fuel for transportation, and health workers and patients fear for their safety. Last week, in Khan Younis, in-patient admissions at field hospitals increased threefold, largely due to access challenges at Nasser, which also saw an influx of trauma patients and has been overwhelmed since.