“Corpses left lying in the road. People with evident signs of starvation stopping trucks in search of anything they can get to survive,” Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told members of the UN Security Council on Friday.

Griffiths stated many people no longer had homes to return to, with shelters in the enclave housing far more people than they could cope with.

Food and water was running out and the risk of famine was growing by the day, he added.

The health system, he said, was “in a state of collapse,” where women were unable to give birth safely, children could not get vaccinated, infectious diseases were on the rise and people had been seeking shelter in hospital yards.

In a stinging criticism, Griffiths said his team’s efforts to send humanitarian convoys to the north have been met with delays and denials amid impossible conditions, with the safety of aid workers being put in danger.

“Orders for evacuation are unrelenting. As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety,” Griffiths said of Israel’s evacuation policies.

“There is no safe place in Gaza. Dignified human life is a near impossibility,” he continued.

But the UN humanitarian chief also urged people not to forget “the 1,200 people killed, thousands injured, and hundreds taken in the brutal attack by Hamas and other armed groups on Israel on October 7, and the accounts of abhorrent sexual violence”.

“What we have seen since October 7 is a stain on our collective conscience. Unless we act, it will become an indelible mark on our humanity.”

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas, which Tel Aviv said killed around 1,200 people.

At least 23,708 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and 60,050 injured, according to Palestinian health authorities.

According to the UN, 85% of the population of Gaza is already internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure is damaged or destroyed.

An official from UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on Friday voiced concern about the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip following the Israeli attacks since Oct. 7.

“I’ve returned today for a week in Gaza and it’s clear from my visit: The situation in Gaza is beyond any of our worst nightmares, and it’s getting worse. What I saw, what I felt was fear, despair, desperation is everywhere,” Dominic Allen, UNFPA Representative for the State of Palestine, told reporters via video link.

Stressing that nowhere safe in Gaza, Allen stated after the fear comes the immense humanitarian needs as the people in the coastal territory lack food, water, health care and shelter.

“I don’t even want to speak about a life with dignity because I didn’t see any of that in Gaza right now. What I saw was really truly heartbreaking,” he added.

The world needs to help Gaza now, Allen said, adding that he is personally “terrified” for over 1 million women and girls, who are “suffering the most,” including 5,500 pregnant women due to give birth in this coming months.

“During my visit I met some of them and I can’t stop thinking about them. Many of them suffering from thirst, malnutrition, lack of health. If the bombs don’t kill them, if disease hunger and dehydration don’t catch up with them, simply giving life, will. And we can’t let this happen.”

A UN spokesman also on Friday voiced concern as Israel continues to displace hundreds of Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip.

“In southern Gaza, new evacuation orders were issued yesterday to residents of the Al-Mawasi area and several blocks near Salah al-Din road, covering an estimated 4.6 square km,” Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

Britain-based charity Oxfam said that the daily death toll of Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza surpasses that of any other major conflict in the 21st century, while survivors remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases and cold, as well as ongoing Israeli bombardments.

“Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years,” Oxfam announced in a statement.

For comparison, the charity provided a list of average deaths per day in other conflicts since the turn of the century: 96.5 in Syria, 51.6 in Sudan, 50.8 in Iraq, 43.9 in Ukraine, 23.8 in Afghanistan, and 15.8 in Yemen.

Oxfam added the crisis is further compounded by Israel’s restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, where only 10 percent of weekly food aid that is needed gets in. This poses a serious risk of starvation for those who survive the relentless bombardment, it said.

United States-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also released its World Report 2024, which said civilians in Gaza have been “targeted, attacked, abused, and killed over the past year at a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine”.

Nearly 24,000 Palestinians have been killed and 60,000 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

“The heinous crimes carried out by Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups since October 7 are the abhorrent legacy of decades-long impunity for unlawful attacks and Israel’s systematic repression of Palestinians,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at HRW.

“How many more civilians must suffer or be killed as a result of war crimes before countries supplying weapons pull the plug and otherwise take action to end these atrocities?” he asked.

This comes as South Africa on Thursday presented its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing the country of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, a charge that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected as “hypocrisy and lies”.

In its report, HRW noted that Israel’s war on Gaza has included “acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation as a method of warfare”, including cutting off essential services such as water and electricity and blocking the entry of most critical humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, HRW noted during the first eight months of 2023, incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property reached the highest daily average since the United Nations started recording this data in 2006. At least 3,291 Palestinians were held in administrative detention without charge or trial, according to Israel Prison Service figures.

“Israeli authorities’ repression of Palestinians, undertaken as part of a policy to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution,” HRW added.

Experts in mapping damage during wartime have also found that the war in Gaza now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.

According to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by the CUNY Graduate Center and Oregon State University, the war has killed more civilians than the US-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against ISIL (ISIS or Daesh).

The offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II, researchers found, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Israel’s offensive has likely either damaged or destroyed more than two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to satellite data collected by the research group.

That includes tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, hospitals, mosques and stores. UN monitors have said that about 70 percent of school buildings across Gaza have been damaged.

“Gaza is now a different colour from space. It’s a different texture,” stated Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center, who has worked to map destruction across several war zones.