Almost a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have faced the winter without a roof over their heads, the international humanitarian organization Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said in a statement, according to Qatari television channel Al Jazeera.
According to NRC, by the end of November only 285,000 displaced Palestinians in Gaza had received the necessary materials for building shelters, while more than 945,000 people still need assistance. “We have received only a fraction of the aid needed to solve the housing crisis,” Al Jazeera quotes Jeroen Kuandzher, chairman of the Palestinian Shelter Council. “Hundreds of thousands of displaced families are enduring the winter cold and rain without any real protection. The repeated refusal of the Israeli authorities to provide basic shelter materials prevents us from scaling up our response to build emergency shelters that can withstand Gaza’s winter conditions,” the humanitarian organization’s representative said.
A number of international organizations continue to report Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries to Gaza. Israeli authorities deny this and claim that they do not restrict the delivery of humanitarian supplies to the Palestinian enclave.