UN Secretary-General makes ‘difficult decision’ to withdraw 30 percent of foreign staff from Gaza amid Israeli attacks.
The United Nations has announced that it will be reducing the size of its international team on the ground in Gaza after renewed attacks on the Palestinian territory by Israeli forces killed hundreds of civilians, including UN personnel.
UN spokesperson Stephan Dujarric said in a news briefing on Monday that approximately 30 of the UN’s 100 or so international staff would leave Gaza this week, admitting that the withdrawal comes at a time when humanitarian needs have soared and “concern over the protection of civilians intensifies”.
Dujarric said the “temporary measure” was a “difficult decision” taken by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for security and operational reasons.
The UN spokesman also confirmed that an Israeli tank was responsible for the attack on a UN compound in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on March 19, that killed a Bulgarian UN staff member and left six other foreign staff with severe injuries.
Dujarric’s statement was the UN’s first to implicate Israeli forces in the attack on the clearly marked UN site. It comes after Israel’s military repeatedly denied that it was responsible for the strike, which came a day after Israel broke its ceasefire agreement with Hamas after just two months of relative peace.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from UN headquarters in New York, said the staff reduction applies to international workers, and that the UN still has thousands more mainly Palestinian staff in Gaza, hundreds of whom have been killed since the start of Israel’s war on the territory.
“The UN has over 13,000 employees in Gaza, the vast majority of them are Palestinians who work as doctors, nurses, drivers and perform other very important humanitarian jobs in Gaza,” Elizondo said.
“Over 250 have been killed in the past 15 months or so, but now, the secretary-general is saying that the situation is so dangerous that of the 100 international staff in Gaza employed by the UN, he’s going to reduce that staffing by about one-third, or about 30 of those international staff, who are going to leave Gaza for their own safety,” Elizondo said.
Dujarric also said that Secretary-General Guterres has demanded “a full, thorough and independent investigation” into the tank attack on the UN compound on March 19.
Israel had claimed that it struck a Hamas site where preparations were being made to fire into Israeli territory.
When asked whether the UN believed the Israeli tank attack was a deliberate strike on the UN’s facility, which Israeli forces knew the exact location of, Dujarric said: “I think that’s one of the reasons we need to have a pretty clear and transparent investigation.”
On Monday, the Israeli military admitted to firing on a building belonging to the Red Cross in Rafah, south of Gaza, blaming the attack on the clearly marked humanitarian organisation’s building as a case of mistaken identity.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said its office in Rafah was damaged by an explosive projectile, though no staff were hurt. The damage has had a direct impact on the ICRC’s ability to operate, the organisation said, without specifying who was behind the explosion.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and wounded some 113,200 more in the territory, health officials said.
