Gaza felt like 'some movie out of Stalingrad', head of Norwegian Refugee Council says

11:32

TÊTE-À-TÊTE © FRANCE 24


 08/11/2024 -

From the show

FRANCE 24 spoke to the head of the NGO Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Jan Egeland, who recently returned from a rare visit to the Gaza Strip. Egeland compared the destroyed urban landscape in the Palestinian enclave to that of Stalingrad or Dresden during World War II.

He added: "I don't think I can recall in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker any place where so many people have been crammed together in such a small area and sustaining such a continuous bombardment with no escape".

"This is not self-defence. This is no targeting of fighters in the war on terror. This is the destruction of entire cities, with 70 percent, as the UN just correctly verified, of the dead being women and children. We can all agree that all of them are totally innocent and many of the men are too. So it's casualties beyond belief," the veteran humanitarian worker said of Israel's bombardment of Gaza.

"Of course, Hamas is also having fighters that are fighting from the civilian areas, and that's a war crime," Egeland noted.

"But that doesn't justify war crimes on the other side. Israel should be better than this. And those who support Israel have to force them to stop it," the head of the NRC said.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US presidential election, Egeland said that "if Donald Trump wants to put America first, he may actually change the current policy which has been to set Israel first".

Since the start of the war in Gaza, which began in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, the US has provided Israel with billions of dollars in military aid.

Egeland expressed hope that the Trump administration might "see this costly this is", "reverse policies and force Netanyahu's government (...) to lay down arms and to negotiate a peaceful coexistence".