Achi news desk-
RAFAH, Egypt (AFP) – The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, on a visit to the doorstep of Gaza, said on Saturday that the world had seen enough of the horrors of the war and appealed for a ceasefire to allow more aid.
“Palestinians in Gaza – children, women, men – remain stuck in a non-stop nightmare,” he said on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing where truckloads of aid trickle into Gaza but the population gets was stalked by “hunger and hunger”.
“I carry the voices of the vast majority of the world who have seen enough,” Guterres said, deploring “communities wiped out, homes demolished, entire families and generations wiped out”.
He reiterated that “nothing justifies the horrific attacks by Hamas” against Israel, triggering the war on October 7. “And nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” said the UN secretary general.
The Ministry of Health in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 32,142 people had been martyred in the territory during more than five months of war between Israel and Palestinian militants. The toll includes at least 72 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 74,412 people had been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7.
Guterres, speaking in a lectern in front of the grand gates to the Gaza side of Rafah, through which aid trucks pass, said the “heartache and dejection of it all” was palpable.
“A long line of rescue trucks blocked on one side of the gates. The long shadow of hunger on the other,” he called a “moral mystery.”
Guterres stressed that “it is more than time for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and appealed to Israel for “full, unfettered access to humanitarian goods throughout Gaza.”
The UN chief, who makes an annual “solidarity mission” to distressed Muslim communities during their holy month of fasting, said “in the spirit of Ramadan’s compassion, it is also time to immediately release all the hostages” held in the October attacks and still held by militants in Gaza.
