00:00I gather you're in Deir al-Ballah, which, for the benefit of our viewers, is a city about halfway down the length of the Gaza Strip, equidistant between Gaza City and Khan Yunus.
00:11Just tell us what the situation is like there in Gaza today.
00:14Thank you very much, Tom. Yes, I am here in Deir al-Ballah, and here the situation is very, very desperate.
00:23It is getting much more crowded than it already was.
00:26People are looking for spaces to sleep, anywhere they can find.
00:31And as we have said repeatedly, there is a very, very small area of Gaza that is currently not either under displacement orders or in otherwise militarized areas.
00:44So people are in need of food, of shelter, of water, medical care, and everything is in very, very short supply.
00:54Indeed. And I mean, food insecurity has been a recurrent issue for several months now.
01:00What level of supplies, what sorts of quantities of supplies are managing to reach people that need them?
01:06So there's some supplies that are entering.
01:08There has also been a limited commercial supply entering for the past few weeks.
01:14But the issue is, is that the conditions on the ground are not allowing us to deliver at scale to meet people's needs, which means that we continue to face delays to pick up supplies.
01:26We continue to face many denials of missions and obstructions, as well as the routes that are provided to us by the Israeli authorities are extremely limited and many times dangerous.
01:37And I'll give you an example. I was in Gaza City just two days ago, and the mission that I was on actually took two tries, which sometimes they take many more.
01:48But the first day we got to Wadi Gaza Bridge, which is just south of Gaza City, and we were told to turn around because the mission had been denied from that point on.
01:59Then the next day we went back, and it took us 14 hours to complete the mission to deliver supplies, medical supplies to Gaza City.
02:08And these kinds of delays, they happen all the time, and missions take 20 hours sometimes and even more.
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