U.N. chief: Conditions in the Gaza Strip a ‘nonstop nightmare’

JERUSALEM — U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres reiterated his call Saturday for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, using a visit to a border crossing in Egypt to slam the “nonstop nightmare” Palestinians faced in the territory.

“I want Palestinians in Gaza to know: You are not alone,” Guterres said. “People around the world are outraged about the horrors we are all witnessing in real time. I carry the voices of the vast majority of the world: We have seen enough. We have heard enough.”

Guterres spoke to reporters from the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, one of the two main ground corridors being used to transport desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. More than five months into Israel’s war against Hamas, Palestinians

in Gaza are facing widespread hunger and deprivation despite a huge international relief effort.

The worsening conditions this past week led the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global authority that has classified food security crises for decades, to project that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian

civilians in northern Gaza. Aid groups and U.N. officials have argued that it would be better for Israel to ease entry restrictions for trucks at established crossing points into the enclave and to do more to speed the delivery of goods inside Gaza.

“From this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all: a long line of blocked red relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other,” Guterres said. “That is more than tragic — it is a moral outrage.”

Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz, responded to Guterres in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Katz criticized the secretary-general for suggesting Israel was to blame for the humanitarian situation in Gaza without also condemning Hamas and the United

Nations for their roles, and for doing so “without calling for the immediate, unconditional release of all Israeli hostages.”

The visit to the border by Guterres came a day after a draft U.N. Security Council resolution, backed by the United States and calling for an “immediate and sustained

Yousef Masoud/The New York Times cease-fire in Gaza,” failed to pass when Russia, China and Algeria voted against it at a meeting of the council in New York.

The body of a child is carried after she was pulled from under the rubble of a home following an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Nov. 3. The dead are found days, weeks and even months after they were buried in the rubble.

Local men survey the damage after an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Dec. 1.