UNRWA pauses aid delivery via key Gaza-Israel crossing

GAZA: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has halted the delivery of aid through the key Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza after it became “impossible,” its chief said Sunday.
“The road out of this crossing has not been safe for months. On 16 November, a large convoy of aid trucks was stolen by armed gangs,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.
“Yesterday, we tried to bring in a few food trucks on the same route. They were all taken,” he added, warning hunger was “rapidly deepening” in Gaza.
Lazzarini listed how the humanitarian operation had become “unnecessarily impossible” because of “the ongoing siege, hurdles from Israeli authorities, political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid, lack of safety on aid routes and targeting of local police.”
It comes after the United Nations warned Friday that Gaza has descended into anarchy, with hunger soaring, looting rampant and rising numbers of rapes in shelters as public order falls apart.
Israel, which imposed a total siege on the Hamas-ruled territory in the early stages of the war last year, blames the inability of relief organizations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.
“Only 7 percent of the aid that came into the Gaza Strip in November was coordinated by UNRWA,” the Israeli defense ministry agency responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, said on X.
“There are dozens of humanitarian organizations operating in the Gaza Strip that continue to take a growing role in delivering humanitarian aid,” it added.
During a press visit Thursday, the Israeli army showed aid shipments at the crossing and said they wait at the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom for “months.”
Lazzarini also said Israel “must refrain from attacks on humanitarian workers.”
His demand follows an Israeli strike Saturday that killed three contractors of the US charity World Central Kitchen, including one who Israel’s military said was involved in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Save The Children later said a strike killed one of its staff members, the second employee to be killed since the war began last October.
The UN last month said 333 aid workers had been killed since the war began in October last year, 243 of them employees of UNRWA.
Lazzarini reiterated his call for a ceasefire “that would also secure the delivery of safe and uninterrupted aid to people in need.”
A summit of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders urged an “immediate and permanent cessation of Israeli fire and military operations” as well as “the delivery of all humanitarian and relief aid and basic needs to the residents of Gaza.”
German deputy foreign minister Tobias Linder also said Israel had no excuse for hampering aid delivery to Gaza before a conference in Cairo on the subject Monday.
Jean-Francois Corty, president of France-based charity Medecins du Monde, warned UNRWA’s decision was a “very bad omen” and “tragic in a context that was already so.”
Claire Nicolet, head of mission in Jerusalem for Doctors Without Borders, told AFP the situation was “already catastrophic” and that UNRWA’s announcement was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” because the UN agency was “the backbone of aid for the supply of food and equipment.”
The Hamas attack in October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,207 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
At least 44,429 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians, have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip since the war began, according to data provided by the health ministry in the territory.
The UN has acknowledged these figures to be reliable.