Nowhere safe in Gaza for people ordered to evacuate: UN chief

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told civilians to leave large swaths of the Gaza Strip, including several neighborhoods in the southern part after it resumed its military offensive over the weekend.

“For people ordered to evacuate, there is nowhere safe to go and very little to survive on,” the secretary-general said.

Guterres added he was extremely alarmed by the resumption of hostilities between Israel, Hamas, and other armed Palestinian groups in Gaza.

He urged Israeli forces to spare civilians from more suffering and to avoid action that would worsen the “catastrophic humanitarian situation”, according to the statement released by Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the secretary general.

“Civilians — including health workers, journalists and UN personnel — and civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times,” the statement said.

Guterres also added he was gravely concerned about the escalation of violence in the occupied West Bank, including a high number of fatalities and arrests, intensified Israeli security operations and settler violence, and attacks on Israelis by Palestinians, the statement read.

The top humanitarian relief official for the United Nations has also warned that the situation in the Gaza Strip keeps getting “more apocalyptic”.

“Every time we think things cannot get any more apocalyptic in Gaza, they do,” Martin Griffiths said in a statement.

“People are being ordered to move again, with little to survive on, forced to make one impossible choice after another.”

Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, added that no one and nowhere is safe in Gaza.

“Such blatant disregard for basic humanity must stop,” he stressed, calling for an end to the fighting.

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday announced it is expanding its ground operations to all of Gaza, following the collapse of a truce with Hamas on Friday.