UNRWA spokesperson Jonathan Fowler describes how staff continue to provide aid to Gaza despite the ongoing blockade.
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00:00And at the moment, organizations like yourself, are you able to help people at all in Gaza during this blockade?
00:08What are you able to do?
00:10Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that question.
00:11I mean, we are the largest humanitarian agency operating in the Gaza Strip from the United Nations.
00:17I mean, we have a long term footprint in the Gaza Strip because of the mandate that we have from the UN General Assembly to provide public services like education and health care.
00:26Now, in times of conflict in the past and during this war, we've pivoted to a more sort of typical humanitarian operation.
00:33But we have 12,000 operational staff and those staff are doing their work stoically.
00:39I mean, they're continuing our water engineers are continuing to do what they can, you know, building spare parts from scrap metal to try to restore pumping stations.
00:48We have teachers, other staff who are doing what we call back to learning activities, trying to sort of give children a bit of a respite, give them sort of basic play, psychosocial support.
01:01We have around 15,000 patient visits a day in our clinics.
01:05So, I mean, you know, we are continuing what we can do to serve the community.
01:09So, I mean, I don't want to, you know, give the impression that the fact that the food that we're able to distribute has run out means that we cannot continue working on the other things we're doing.
01:19But, of course, our staff are also part of the community themselves.
01:21So, our own staff are running out of food and having to ration.
01:24So, our staff are working on the other things that we're doing to serve the community themselves.