Mercy Corps

“The first idea is to put people who are not needed in a safer place, right? But the other part is once you've done it, you're free to go about your job with the team that is on the ground. So if you know you're going to have to probably evacuate at some point,…”

“We had some tragedies in the families of our staff. One lost his wife. Another one was wounded with a child. Other had relatives wounded.”

“You have different types of organizations. Some are advocacy organizations whose job is to be vocal and to bring a very strong point of view. I'm working for an operational organization, one that is driven by an imperative to deliver. So we have to discipline …”

“We are starting from a level of destruction that is absolutely unprecedented, even in Gaza.”

“What we are looking at today is, is completely out of that pattern, and it's of a magnitude in terms of the geopolitical rippling effects and consequences that I've never seen before.”

“There will not be enough support for several years to come to get back to a level of normal.”

“The first week our team was receiving horrible messages of people who are trapped in basements, and they were asking to send people to take them out. And we were Looking for ways to make that happen and we could not.”

“And I'm very afraid that if this trend continues, it will have to increasingly trust them to function by themselves because we won't be able to interact as much.”

“We have about 70 staff plus their families. All of them had to relocate over the past three weeks.”

“The small trucks that, like convoys that came through, it's just a drop in an ocean of needs. They could not organize proper distributions. There were a mass of people showing up and it became completely unsafe.”