U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday the anger on all sides in the Middle East is the greatest he has seen in two decades of trying to help the troubled region make peace.
'I've never seen nations as polarized as during this recent visit,' said Egeland, who was in Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip at the end of July.
'People were enraged collectively in Lebanon, everybody against the Israeli indiscriminate onslaught,' he said in an interview with The Associated Press. 'In Israel, they were a united front to support the strong military measures. In the Palestinian areas, I've never seen them as full of hatred collectively as now. It has to be defused.'
Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said he was counting on the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution that will stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and serve as a first step to finally concluding a peace settlement in the Middle East.
'Everybody wants now to find a permanent political solution,' he said in his office in the world body's European headquarters. 'This has now become a powder keg. You have really to defuse it. You cannot just delay further conflict.'
Egeland said the tensions were the worst he had seen in the more than 20 years he has been working to promote peace and human rights in the Middle East, including a stint as a soldier in the U.N. force in Lebanon in 1978 and involvement in securing the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO in the 1990s.
Egeland said the Israel-Hezbollah fighting could be stopped immediately if there is the will because it isn't protracted and there are only two parties, not 20 as in the Sudanese region of Darfur, which has been wracked by conflict since 2003.
The Security Council has to come up with a resolution that will be respected, Egeland said.
'We've seen resolutions that are effective and we've seen resolutions that are ineffective, and an ineffective one doesn't help us at all,' he said. 'There has to be some teeth in it and there has to be pressure on the parties to respect it.
'Every day of non-decision in the Security Council costs lives,' Egeland said.
Hundreds of Lebanese have already died and the numbers are likely to start going up sharply soon, he said.
'Imagine the predicament of the civilian population. On the one side they've been asked by Israel to leave because it's too dangerous to stay. At the same time, now the Israelis say that they will fire at any truck moving that has not been cleared as a humanitarian convoy by the U.N. or the Red Cross,' Egeland said. 'The people are really in a desperate situation.'
He said it was impossible to predict how many people will die.
'People do not start to starve immediately in a place like Lebanon if they are cut off. For weeks they can eat from whatever reserves they have. Disease does not start to spread immediately. But after a few weeks, there are no more coping mechanisms. Sick people die. Hospitals stop to function, and that has already started because they do not have fuel. Wounded people die because they cannot get medical attention.
'It's not going slowly to the worst, it's going dramatically down after a few weeks in this kind of a situation, and that's why it's so urgent to stop it all with a U.N. resolution and get a cease-fire.'
He said that by some measures, the situation for