Uganda, Gaza, Lebanon & other topics - Daily Press Briefing (19 January 2024)

Noon Briefing by Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.

Highlights:
- Secretary-General Travels
- Gaza
- Gaza-Women
- Lebanon
- Haiti
- Zambia
- Senior Personnel Appointment
- International Tourism

SECRETARY-GENERAL TRAVELS
The Secretary-General as you know, is travelling as we told you yesterday. He will be arriving shortly in Uganda where over the weekend he will participate in two Summit. One, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the other one the Group of 77 plus China Summit. We will be sharing all of that information, the speeches with you, hopefully later today ahead of time. The Secretary-General is also expected to have various bilateral meetings including with the Vice President of Viet Nam, Ms. Võ Thị Ánh Xuân, and Phillip Isdor Mpango, the Vice President of Tanzania and President Museveni, President of Uganda, the host. And we expect other bilateral which we will share with you in due course.

GAZA
Turning to Gaza, I have an update focused on water for drinking and domestic use. The fact that it’s shrinking every day. Humanitarian partners say the municipal wells are currently at just a tenth of their production capacity prior to the escalation of hostilities – it’s now over 21,000 cubic metres a day, down from 255,000 cubic metres a day prior to 7 October. Water from these wells that have to be used is known to be substandard, given that it is brackish, that means it is salty.
Water from the Israeli-operated lines had been the best source of safe drinking water prior to the hostilities. But at present, only one of the three lines – the Bani Said point – is functional, yielding less than half of what would have been available if all the lines had been working.
Furthermore, water availability through the short-term desalination plants is currently at just seven per cent of the pre-crisis capacity. Due to import restrictions on critical items, water testing kits and chlorine to treat the water across Gaza is unavailable according to our colleagues.
The accumulation of solid and fecal waste, which has been worsened by rains and floods, is also giving rise to severe health and environmental threats.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is already reporting 152,000 cases of diarrhoea – more than half of those cases are children under five years old – and the inability to do water chlorination to kill bacteria is aggravating the already concerning situation.
WHO says that on average, 500 people are sharing one toilet, and some shelters have none. More than 2,000 people sometimes are forced to use one single shower.
Lack of toilets and sanitation services have forced people to resort to open air defecation, increasing concerns over disease outbreaks.
Disrupted routine vaccination activities, as well as lack of medicines for treating communicable diseases, is further raising the risk of disease spread.
Many people who lack access to health facilities may be going undiagnosed, indicating that the situation could be more severe than what we are able to monitor.
Routine surveillance systems are not currently functioning, hampering effective detection, analysis, and response to public health threats.
WHO, the UN Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, and the Ministry of Health in Gaza are scaling up a flexible disease surveillance system in shelters and health facilities.
Meanwhile, our humanitarian colleagues are reporting that Israeli restrictions on the import of critical equipment -- including communications devices -- are severely compromising safe and effective aid operations anywhere in Gaza.
In the north, we and our partners are trying to increase humanitarian deliveries -- but access denials by the Israeli military are preventing a scale-up. Just seven of 29 planned missions during the first two weeks of January could be fully or even just partially carried out. More details are available in a humanitarian snapshot published by our colleagues in OCHA.


Full Highlights: https://www.un.org/sg/en/conte....nt/noon-briefing-hig