LONDON: Scotland’s leader, First Minister Humza Yousaf, said his wife’s parents, who are stuck in Gaza, are running out of water as they continue to shelter from Israel’s relentless bombardment.
Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla have been trapped in the Palestinian territory for more than two weeks, after Israel placed Gaza under a total blockade following the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
“It’s a nightmare situation,” Yousaf, who is Scotland’s first minister, told BBC Scotland News. “It’s a nightmare for us but it’s torture for them. They can’t sleep and of course they worry about the house being bombarded.”
The couple are down to just six bottles of drinking water in a house in which 100 people are sheltering, including a newborn child, he added.
Twenty trucks filled with aid supplies crossed the border into Gaza from Egypt on Saturday, the first such humanitarian deliveries in two weeks. Campaigners described the aid as a “drop in the ocean” compared with what is needed to help Gaza’s population of 2.2 million.
Even before Israel launched its military operation, UN agencies had warned that Gaza was experiencing a “desperate” humanitarian crisis and relied on about 500 trucks a day delivering vital supplies. About 1.2 million people in the territory were dependent on food aid from the UN Relief and Works Agency before hostilities began on Oct. 7.
“We’re seeing trickles of aid coming through — nowhere near what needs to go in,” Yousaf said.
His wife’s parents live in the Scottish city of Dundee but traveled to Gaza to visit a sick relative shortly before the Hamas attacks. He said that they do not know “whether they are going to make it from one night to the next.”
UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said he is coordinating with authorities in Israel and Egypt to reopen the Rafah border crossing into Egypt to help British nationals leave the besieged territory, the BBC reported.
Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 4,300 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of them civilians, in the past two weeks, according to the territory’s Health Ministry.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military told the BBC on Saturday said it would “deepen” and “increase” the strikes to “minimize the risks to our forces in the next stages of the war.”
Yousaf urged the UK government to demand the safe passage of civilians from Gaza.
“There are far too many innocent men, women and children, not just my mother-in-law and father-in-law, many, many innocent men, women and children are suffering a great deal,” he said.
Thousands of people took part in pro-Palestinian protests across the UK over the weekend, including one in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Organizers of a demonstration in London said at least 300,000 people marched on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Gaza.
