Starving Gazans continue to be deprived of aid as international relief efforts and the war-devastated Palestinian territory has become the hungriest place in the word, the United Nations said.
The Israeli authorities continued to constrain the aid efforts even as there have been reports of Israeli prime minister and Palestinian militant organization Hamas indicating their readiness to accept a U.S. proposal for a 60-day ceasefire in the war, which has killed more than 53 people in Gaza and 1200 in Israel.
“Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth,” UN humanitarian affairs coordination office OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said in Geneva, stressing that the besieged strip is the only defined territory in the world where the entire population is at risk of famine.
“The aid operation that we have ready to roll is being put in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations, not only in the world today, but in recent history,” he said.
Laerke explained that out of nearly 900 aid trucks that were approved to enter from the Israeli side since the reopening of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the war-torn enclave ten days ago, less than 600 have been offloaded on the Gaza side.
The OCHA spokesperson termed the limited number of truckloads coming in is a “trickle”.
“It is drip-feeding food into an area on the verge of catastrophic hunger,” he insisted.
In Washington, the White House said Israel has accepted a new U.S. proposal for a temporary ceasefire with Hamas.
President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is confident about the proposal turning into an agreement toward pausing the Israeli-Hamas conflict and facilitating return of the remaining hostages, who were taken to Gaza by Hamaz on October 7, 2023.
In Geneva, UN aid official Laerke noted in added that many of the trucks were “swarmed by desperate people” on the way.
“It’s a survival reaction by desperate people who want to feed their families,” he said, adding that the aid on the trucks “had been paid for by the donors to go to those people”.
“I don’t blame them one second for taking the aid that essentially is already theirs, but it’s not distributed in a way we wanted,” he explained.
On Wednesday, hungry crowds overran a UN World Food Program (WFP) warehouse in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, where limited stocks of wheat flour had been pre-positioned for use by the few bakeries able to resume operations.
The incident reportedly left two people dead.
Meanwhile , a new US and Israeli-backed aid distribution scheme run by a private entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operating independently of the UN this week in the Strip.
On Tuesday at least 47 Palestinians were reportedly shot and injured trying to collect aid from its distribution facility in the south, according to information received by UN human rights office, OHCHR.
According to the world body over 80 per cent of the Gaza Strip is within Israeli militarized zones or under displacement orders.
Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas collapsed on 18 March nearly 635,000 people in the enclave have been displaced yet again.
Iftikhar Ali is a veteran Pakistani journalist, former president of UN Correspondents Association, and a recipient of the Pride of Performance civil award
