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STORY: GENEVA / GAZA HUMANITARIAN UPDATE
TRT: 4:19
SOURCE: UNTV CH
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 16 May 2025 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Med shot, exterior, Palais des Nations, Flag Alley
2. Wide shot, press room and podium speakers
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Margaret Harris, spokesperson, WHO:
“My colleagues in the Strip said it was to use their words, ‘a very loud night’ last night. The people - most of the injured - are going to the Indonesian hospital which as you know was just a shell. We've done our best to bring it back together and they are doing their best to treat everyone, but they lack everything needed to provide those supplies.”
4. Med shot, journalist
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Margaret Harris, spokesperson, WHO:
“The European General Hospital was one of the best organized hospitals and it was in fact the one we used when we were gathering people together for an evacuation and that first bombing, as you probably know, destroyed two of the buses that we'd assembled to take children.”
6. Med shot, podium speakers
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Jens Laerke, Spokesperson, OCHA:
“The UN has had 14 meetings with the Israelis on the proposed new aid scheme. It excludes many, including people with disabilities, women, children, the elderly and the wounded. It forces further displacement, it exposes thousands of people to harm. It sets an unacceptable precedent for aid delivery not just in the Occupied Palestinian Territory but around the world. It restricts aid not - to only part of Gaza, while leaving other dire needs unmet. It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.”
8. Med shot, podium
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Jens Laerke, spokesperson, OCHA:
“I received this morning of some of the aid that's waiting just outside the borders to get in. It includes educational supplies, children's bags, shoes, size three to four years old and up to 10 years old; stationery and toys, rice, wheat flour and beans, eggs, pasta, various sweets, tents, water tanks, cold storage boxes, breastfeeding kits, breastmilk substitutes, energy biscuits, shampoo and hand soap, floor cleaner. I ask you, how much war can you wage with this?”
10. Wide shot, Press room, TV screens, control booths.
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Jens Laerke, spokesperson, OCHA:
“I cannot be 100 per cent sure say that nothing has been diverted, nobody can do that in an operation, anywhere. But it's not at a scale that justifies closing down an entire life-saving aid operation. If you had been in a coma for the last three years and you woke up and saw this for the first time, anyone with common sense would say this is insane.”
12. Med shot, podium, journalists
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Margaret Harris, spokesperson, WHO:
“I’d emphasize this false narrative that this has to happen because it's aid diversion; in the health sector, we've not seen that. All we see is a desperate need at all times.”
14. Wide shot, TV screens, journalists
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Margaret Harris, spokesperson, WHO:
“So far we've only had 255 patients in total evacuated since 18 March, and as I said last week, more than 10,000 patients, including approximately 4,500 children, need urgent medical care outside Gaza.”
16. Wide shot, press room
17. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Margaret Harris, spokesperson, WHO:
“People are in terror. This is two million people in terror and human beings are not built for endless fear. Even the strongest break under this weight of constant trauma.”
18. Wide shot, press room.
19. SOUNDBITE (English) Jens Laerke, spokesperson, OCHA:
“The situation at as it has developed now is so grotesquely abnormal that some popular pressure on leaders around the world needs to happen. We know it is happening, I’m not saying that people are silent, because they are not. But it doesn’t appear that their leaders are listening to them.”
20. Med shot, journalist
Amid reports that Israeli strikes across Gaza into Friday (16 May) killed at least 64 people, aid teams once again pushed back strongly at allegations that aid is being diverted to Hamas and pleaded for the blockade to end.
Updating journalists in Geneva, Margaret Harris said that most of those injured in the attacks had sought help from the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, even though it was now “just a shell” after 19 months of war.
“We've done our best to bring it back together and they are doing their best to treat everyone, but [medical teams] lack everything needed,” she insisted.
Rejecting accusations that relief supplies have been handed over to Hamas as false, the WHO spokesperson said that “in the health sector, we've not seen that. All we see is a desperate need at all times.”
Echoing that message, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, explained that a stringent system of checks and reports to donors meant that all relief supplies were closely tracked in real time, making diversion highly unlikely.
Even if it were happening, “it's not at a scale that justifies closing down an entire life-saving aid operation”, OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said. “If you had been in a coma for the last three years and you woke up and saw this for the first time, anyone with common sense would say this is insane.”
The development comes more than 10 weeks since the Israeli authorities stopped all food, fuel, medicines and more from reaching Gaza.
The result has been rising malnutrition - unknown in Gaza before the war – and looming famine, while thousands of truckloads of essential supplies have had to be stored in Jordan and Egypt, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees and the largest aid operation in Gaza.
In its latest update, OCHA said that the UN and its partners have 9,000 truckloads of vital supplies ready to move into Gaza. More than half contain food assistance which could provide months of food for the enclave’s 2.1 million people.
An inventory of the relief supplies “waiting just outside the borders to get in” illustrates their humanitarian purpose, Laerke said.
“It includes educational supplies, children's bags, shoes, size three to four years old and up to 10 years old; stationery and toys, rice, wheat flour and beans, eggs, pasta, various sweets, tents, water tanks, cold storage boxes, breastfeeding kits, breastmilk substitutes, energy biscuits, shampoo and hand soap, floor cleaner. I ask you, how much war can you wage with this?”
