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UNRWA says 142 staff members killed in Gaza since beginning of Israel’s genocidal war

Monday, 08 January 2024 6:16 AM [ Last Update: Monday, 08 January 2024 6:16 AM ]

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of an Israeli strike, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 7, 2024. (Photo by Reuters)

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) says more than 140 members of its staff have lost their lives in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s unrelenting bombardment of the besieged coastal territory.

The UNRWA announced in a statement on Sunday that 142 of its employees have been killed as a result of the ongoing Israeli onslaught, stressing that the figure marks the highest toll of casualties among UN staff in the history of the international organization.

According to the relief agency, 130 of its facilities and schools have been directly affected because of the Israeli bombardment across all neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip.

It said that the situation in Gaza, which Israel has turned into an uninhabitable place, is more perilous than the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), when Israel was created at the expense of the forced expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.

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Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are reportedly dying of starvation, and a humanitarian catastrophe has befallen the residents, necessitating intensified efforts to allow the flow of humanitarian aid, the UN agency noted.

Israel waged the war on the strip on October 7 after the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance groups of Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories in response to the occupying regime’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people.

According to the Gaza-based health ministry, at least 22,835 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in the strikes, and another 58,416 individuals injured.

Tel Aviv has also imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.

More than three months into the offensive, the usurping Israeli regime has failed to achieve its objectives of “destroying Hamas” and finding Israeli captives.

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