Around nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been displaced at least once since the war between Israel and Hamas began, the UN humanitarian agency said Wednesday.

 

Andrea De Domenico, head of the United Nations’ OCHA agency in the Palestinian territories, said that around 1.9 million people are thought to be displaced in Gaza.

“We estimate that nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” he told reporters in New York and Geneva, speaking from Jerusalem.

“Before we were estimating 1.7 (million) but since that number, we had the operation in Rafah, and we had additional displacement from Rafah,” he said, explaining the increase.

“Then we had also operations in the north that has also moved people,” he added. 

He said such military operations had forced people to reset their lives, over and over again.

“Behind these numbers, there are people... that have fears and grievances. And they had probably dreams and hopes; the less and less, I fear today, unfortunately,” De Domenico said.

“People who in the last nine months have been moved around like pawns in a board game.”

He said the Gaza Strip had been cut in two by Israel’s military operations, with OCHA estimating that there were 300,000-350,000 people living in the north of the besieged territory who were unable to go to the south.

Meanwhile he added that since the war began, an estimated 110,000 people had managed to leave the Gaza Strip before the Rafah crossing into Egypt was closed in early May.

De Domenico said some had remained in Egypt while others had since moved onwards.

Israel’s offensive since then has killed at least 38,011 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.