2023-11-26 18:29:43
Khaled Mansour has been a spokesperson for UN agencies in countries at war: Afghanistan (2000-2002), Iraq (2003), Lebanon (2006), Sudan (2008-2010). Between 2013 and 2015, he served as executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the largest human rights NGO in Egypt – his native country. He now lives in Jordan, where he works notably as a consultant on humanitarian aid and human rights.
What do the images of the exodus of Palestinians fleeing on foot from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip remind you?
They remind me of those of displaced crowds, in Rwanda or Bosnia, in the 1990s. The time was “never again!” ”, yet here we are again. Seeing such scenes again feeds cynicism and anger. The international community has failed to avoid this repetition. Israel was attacked on October 7 by Hamas, which carried out horrific massacres. Israeli leaders say they want to get rid of the threat [du Hamas]but in my opinion, their massive reprisals against the Gaza Strip are sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s violence.
More than 100 employees of UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7. How can we explain such a deadly toll?
Such losses are unprecedented in the history of the United Nations. The overwhelming majority of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza are Palestinians. They live in the same conditions as the rest of the population. Like all residents, they had to flee and seek refuge in UNRWA schools – more than 50 of which were hit by Israeli airstrikes [selon l’UNRWA, les écoles constituent la majorité de ses 69 structures endommagées, dont 23 ont fait l’objet de tirs directs]. More than half of the personnel killed were south of Wadi Gaza, that is to say in the area to which the civilians had received the order. [le 9 octobre] of the Israeli army to move.
In 2003, in Iraq, I narrowly escaped the attack which had targeted [le 19 août] the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad [au cours duquel 22 membres du personnel de l’agence sont morts]. At the time, my colleagues and I blamed the agency’s security arm for its shortcomings. But in the present case, in Gaza, with bombings of such intensity and in a very densely populated area, I do not see what measures the United Nations could have put in place to protect their teams.
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