Algeria has prepared a draft resolution on Rafah which it will present to members of the UN Security Council this afternoon. The Algerian ambassador to the Glass Palace, Amar Bendjama, told journalists this on the sidelines of the closed-door consultations of the Fifteen. “It will be a short and resolute text to stop the killings in Rafah,” he said. It is not clear when the text will go to the vote, and whether the US intends to block it with a veto.
Unicef official: “Gaza is the children's cemetery”
«I saw many children dead under the rubble, their bodies covered in blood. Others carried in the arms of their mothers asking for help. Gaza has become the children's cemetery.” This is the testimony to the QN of Jonathan Crickx, a Belgian, Unicef official working in Gaza, returning from Rafah. «I can't get out of my mind what my eyes have seen – he adds – entire families destroyed, children without parents, bombs falling on areas that they call safe, but which aren't safe because safe areas simply don't exist» .
The situation in Rafah is «worse than what is seen from the outside. Every day we tell ourselves: it can't be worse than yesterday, and yet it is. I have been working with Unicef for twelve years and I have never seen anything like this, not even in places like Afghanistan or Haiti. Colleagues who have been working in crisis areas for 30-35 years, who have been to the places of the most dramatic catastrophes, all, everyone, say they have not seen anything like this, on this scale, for this length. We need people to understand: we really need to avoid a final attack on Rafah because the consequences would be incalculable.”
«Food is structurally lacking, water was already limited – he explains – and now for the refugees who are forced to move from Rafah it is even less. And there is also a lack of fuel” needed “for the hospital generators”. The refugees who sought refuge in Rafah «are in constant, desperate movement, 840 thousand people have done so. Does he have any idea how many there are? There is no space for tents. And where they arrive they literally pitch their tents on the pulverized remains of the inhabited areas. These people only have eyes for crying.”