World Food Program suspends aid deliveries to northern Gaza as starvation fears worsen
UN agency warns Palestinians in besieged territory already dying from hunger-related causes
The World Food Program (WFP) said Tuesday it was forced to pause deliveries of food aid to isolated northern Gaza because of the "complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order," further hiking fears of potential starvation.
The WFP said it had first suspended deliveries to the north three weeks ago after a strike hit an aid truck.
The agency tried resuming this week, but convoys on Sunday and Monday faced gunfire and crowds of hungry people stripping goods and beating one driver.
It said it was working to resume deliveries as soon as possible.
The WFP also called for the opening of crossing points for aid directly into northern Gaza from Israel and a better notification system to co-ordinate with the Israeli military.
It warned of a "precipitous slide into hunger and disease," saying, "People are already dying from hunger-related causes."
Entry of aid trucks into the besieged territory has sharply declined by more than half the past two weeks, according to UN figures.
Overwhelmed UN and relief workers say aid intake and distribution has been crippled by Israeli failure to ensure convoys' safety amid its bombardment and ground offensive and by a breakdown in security, with hungry Palestinians frequently overwhelming trucks to take food.
The weakening of the aid operation threatens to deepen misery across the territory, where the Israeli military air and ground offensive, launched in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, has obliterated entire neighbourhoods and displaced more than 80 per cent of the population of 2.3 million.
Heavy fighting and airstrikes have flared in the past two days in areas of northern Gaza that the Israeli military said had been largely cleared of Hamas weeks ago.
The military on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of two neighbourhoods on Gaza City's southern edge, an indication that militants are still putting up stiff resistance.
The north, including Gaza City, has been isolated since Israeli troops first moved into it in late October.
Large swaths of the city have been reduced to rubble, but several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in the area, largely cut off from aid.
They describe famine-like conditions, in which families limit themselves to one meal a day and often resort to mixing animal and bird fodder with grains to bake bread.
"The situation is beyond your imagination," said Soad Abu Hussein, a widow and mother of five children sheltering in a school in Jabaliya refugee camp. Ayman Abu Awad, who lives in Zaytoun, said he eats one meal a day to save whatever he can for his four children. "People have eaten whatever they find, including animal feed and rotten bread," he said.
Potential 'explosion' in preventable deaths
A study by the UN children's agency, UNICEF, warned that one in six children in the north are acutely malnourished.
UNICEF official Ted Chaiban said in a statement that Gaza "is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths, which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza."
The report released Monday by the Global Nutrition Cluster, an aid partnership led by UNICEF, found that in 95 per cent of Gaza's households, adults were restricting their own food to ensure small children can eat, while 65 per cent of families eat only one meal a day.
More than 90 per cent of children under five in Gaza eat two or fewer food groups a day, known as severe food poverty, the report said.
A similar percentage are affected by infectious diseases, with 70 per cent experiencing diarrhea in the last two weeks.
More than 80 per cent of homes lack clean and safe water.
In Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah, where most humanitarian aid enters, the acute malnutrition rate is five per cent, compared to 15 per cent in northern Gaza.
Before the war, the rate across Gaza was less than one per cent, the report said.
A UN report in December found that Gaza's entire population is in a food crisis, with one in four facing starvation.
Blocking aid deliveries
The war began when Hamas-led militants rampaged across communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. The militants are still holding some 130 captives.
Gaza's Health Ministry said Tuesday that the total Palestinian death toll since Oct. 7 had risen to 29,195. The ministry does not differentiate between fighters and civilians in its records, but says women and children make up two-thirds of those killed.
Israel blocked entry of all food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies into Gaza soon after the attacks.
Under U.S. pressure, it began to allow a trickle of aid trucks to enter from Egypt at the Rafah crossing, and in December opened one crossing from Israel into southern Gaza, Kerem Shalom.
The trucks have become virtually the sole source of food and other supplies for Gaza's population.
But the number entering has fallen since Feb. 9 to an average of around 60 a day from an average of more than 140 daily in January, according to figures from the UN office for humanitarian co-ordination, known as OCHA.
Even at its height, UN officials said the flow was not enough to sustain the population and was far below the 500 trucks a day entering before the war.
The cause of the drop was not immediately clear.
For weeks, right-wing Israeli protesters have been holding demonstrations to block trucks, saying Gaza's people should not be given aid.
UN agencies have also complained that cumbersome and complicated Israeli procedures for searching trucks before entry have slowed crossings.
But chaos within Gaza appears to be a major cause. Moshe Tetro, an official with COGAT, an Israeli military body in charge of civilian Palestinian affairs, said the bottleneck was because the UN and other aid groups can't accept the trucks in Gaza or distribute them to the population.
He said more than 450 trucks were waiting on the Palestinian side of Kerem Shalom crossing, but no UN staff had come to distribute them.
In a rare public criticism of Israel, a top U.S. envoy, David Satterfield, said this week that its targeted killings of Gaza police commanders guarding truck convoys have made it "virtually impossible" to distribute the goods safely.
Besides crowds of desperate Palestinians swarming convoys, aid workers have said they are hampered by heavy fighting, repeated strikes hitting trucks and Israeli failure to guarantee deliveries' safety.
The UN says that from Jan 1 to Feb. 12, 51 per cent of its planned aid deliveries to north Gaza were denied access by Israeli authorities.
