News - Middle East: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been “trapped in increasingly small and overcrowded areas” due to Israel’s evacuation orders, says the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

UNRWA warned that “nowhere is safe” in the war-torn besieged territory.

In a post on its official account on X on Tuesday, UNRWA said, “People are exhausted from the continuous displacement and unlivable conditions & they are trapped in increasingly small & overcrowded areas.”

“There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza. Evacuation orders have hit a huge part of the Strip leaving less & less places to go for the displaced.”

Israel’s repeated evacuation orders and strikes increasingly deteriorate the coastal enclave’s health system and make it more and more difficult for constantly displaced large groups of Palestinians to access essential services, particularly those suffering from chronic diseases.

The latest order, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, was issued on Monday when the Israeli military ordered Palestinians residing in eastern and central Khan Yunis to immediately evacuate westwards.

The order covers about 8.7 square kilometers in the so-called “humanitarian zone” in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis.

“The area of the ‘humanitarian zone’ as designated by the Israeli military has thus decreased by 14.8 percent, from 58.9 to 50.2 square kilometers,” the report added. 

Meanwhile, a top World Health Organization (WHO) official in Palestinian territories said he is “extremely worried” about polio and other outbreaks of contagious diseases in Gaza after traces of the virus turned up in sewage samples in the blockaded sliver.

The WHO and UNICEF reportedly plan to dispatch a joint team to Gaza on Thursday to begin collecting samples, with clear recommendations expected within the coming days on how to tackle the threat, including a potential mass vaccination campaign.

Israel launched the campaign of death, destruction and genocide after it was caught off-guard by Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories.

The regime has killed over 39,000 Palestinians, most of them women, children, and adolescents, in Gaza since October.

It has been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced into a trickle the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory.

Source: Press TV