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A United Nations humanitarian relief worker has spoken of the moment her aid vehicle came under fire as she queued to enter Gaza City.
Louise Wateridge, from the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), was stuck at a checkpoint on her way to clear UN buildings of unexploded shells.
She told The Independent: “We were sitting there. There were some families coming through, which is quite common now in the last couple of weeks, people forcibly displaced from the north to the south.
“There was some military action to the right, the Israeli military were clearing some of the area to the right of the convoy in the eastern part, and they had a bulldozer and machinery.
“There was gunfire and there were five hits to the car that I was in, which was the last car in the convoy.
“Two, or three of the bullets entered into the vehicle, there was some shrapnel inside the vehicle.”
She said the bullets struck the empty back seats of the vehicle - empty becuse a colleague dropped out that morning.
She added: “It shouldn’t be down to luck, that there was no one in the back seat- it just shouldn’t be happening.
“The assessment at the time is that it was IDF fire. The right of where we were was an IDF-controlled area, and there was an IDF operation of sorts happening while we were there and the bullets came from that direction.
“It was hit by five bullets, the back window was shattered and a couple of the bullets came through the vehicle. It looks like one of the bullets became shrapnel and shattered.
“The driver with me, Mohammed, felt the shrapnel hit him in the car because that forced him to retreat. It would take a certain kind of bullet to damage a car like this.”
The car was forced to turn around back to the UN warehouse where it was deemed too dangerous to continue the mission. The mission went on with the three other armoured vehicles.
Ms Wateridge said she was “fighting a losing battle” trying to clean up unexploded ordnance from UN buildings being used for shelter.
She said: “Everywhere you are in the Gaza Strip now, you’re so close to the front line. The front line is everywhere, it’s all around us.
“People in Gaza City tell us two things: One, they didn’t want to leave the north because they still had family buried under the rubble, they haven’t got them out yet and they haven’t put them to rest yet.
“Or they’d spoken to family or friends down south who said, ‘Don’t come here. It’s not better. There’s no point’.”
She insisted the constant evacuation orders which keep thousands of people on the roads make it impossible to be able to guarantee safety in any area of Gaza City.
“The schools in the south I go to you can’t see the floor. There’s elderly people sleeping in the hallways or the stairwell”, she said.
“People are saying to us ‘Why move? I’m going to die there or I’m going to die here, so I’d rather die here because we’re all together.’”
An IDF spokesman said: “Last Sunday a report was received regarding damage caused to a UN vehicle as it approached the humanitarian corridor in the Gaza Strip.
“The IDF is currently unaware of an event as described in the claim.
“The IDF works around the clock to coordinate with international humanitarian organizations operating within the Gaza Strip.”
It came before the Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval to a bill declaring a UN relief agency working for Palestinian refugees a terrorist organisation.
The bill, sponsored by Israeli politician Yulia Malinovsky, accused the UNRWA of acting as a “fifth column within Israel”. The bill claimed many of UNRWA’s staff were members of terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, though no evidence was provided.
UNRWA, which offers services to millions of Palestinians, has faced increasing opposition from Israel, which has called for its dissolution.
UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma called the law “another attempt in a wider campaign to dismantle the agency”.
“Such steps are unheard of in the history of the United Nations,” she said.
