"A year of brutal war" has turned the Gaza Strip into a "cemetery for tens of thousands of Palestinians, including a very large number of children," the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said on Monday.

"It has been a year in which families in Gaza are subjected to unspeakable suffering on a daily basis, with forced displacement, disease, hunger and death becoming the daily norm for two million people trapped in a devastated enclave," Lazzarini added in a statement on Monday evening.

He continued: "A year of brutal war has turned the Gaza Strip into an unrecognizable sea of rubble, and a cemetery for tens of thousands of Palestinians, including a very large number of children."

He stressed that "the destruction of basic infrastructure has reached catastrophic levels," emphasizing that "in Gaza, civilians are still bearing the brunt of the war."

As for the children of Gaza, Lazzarini said, “They are the first and most affected. In addition to the killing and injury, every child in Gaza suffers psychological trauma, and many of them suffer invisible scars for life, while more than 650,000 children have lost another year of learning.”