Martin Griffiths, the UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator, says his organisation hoped and was told that once the war moved to southern Gaza, there would be a different, more precise, approach to the fighting, Al Jazeera reports.

“[But] what’s happened is the assault on southern Gaza has been no less than the north. It’s raging through Khan Younis at the moment, and it is threatening Rafah. The compression of the population is greater. We cannot be sure of any of our points of operation to be safe,” he told Al Jazeera.

Griffiths added that UN aid workers were operating on a form of “humanitarian opportunism” in the Gaza Strip which is not the typical characteristic of a humanitarian operation, which includes a level of dependability and safety, both for aid workers and for the people they serve.

“Those conditions don’t exist in southern Gaza.”