UN Staff Member Who Died In Gaza Reaches 92 People

Badminton UNICEF/Eyad El Baba/PHOTO via news.un.org

JAKARTA - The number of United Nations staff members killed in the Gaza Strip has reached 92 people amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.

During an interview with Swiss local media, Lazzarini said some 13,000 UN members were employed in the Gaza Strip. He said that UNRWA had never experienced such many deaths in such a short time.

"Currently, more than 700,000 people have fled to schools founded by UNRWA in order to take cover under the UN blue flag," he said as quoted by ANTARA, Thursday, November 9.

However, more than 50 of their facilities have been attacked, claiming dozens of lives and injuring hundreds more, Lazzarini said.

Saving themselves to the southern region of the Gaza Strip is also not guaranteed to be safe, the senior UN official said. Furthermore, he said a third of the UN staff there died as a result of being bombarded.

"The longer the casualties continue to fall -- as Israel has announced, the further away we are from the prospect of peace in the future," he said.

During the interview, Lazzarini admitted that he was very surprised by what he found in Gaza.

"The situation is heartbreaking," he said.

Lazzarini said people were in short supply, they saved themselves to UNRWA schools and asked for bread and water.

There is a fuel crisis, he said. If no fuel arrives in Gaza in the next few days, the main facilities will no longer work," he added.

The aid supply blockade is tantamount to almost no trade and public order being threatened, according to the UN official.

"If in the near future there is no change, then many people will lose their lives due to lack of humanitarian assistance and not due to bombing," he said.

Such a tight bubble means the same as collective penalties, Lazzarini said.