UNRWA says aid push in northern Gaza ‘frustrated’ as regional tensions rises

GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 6th Feb.  UN humanitarians on Monday reported that a food convoy in Gaza had been hit by shelling after a deadly weekend of hostilities in Gaza in which at least 234 Palestinians were killed, cited regional tensions in the Middle East.

Tom White, Director of Affairs for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNWRA said that “This morning a food convoy waiting to move into northern Gaza was hit by Israeli naval gunfire; thankfully no-one was injured.”

He shared two photographs on X showed a stationary flat-bed lorry parked in front of a UN vehicle with a gaping hole where part of its cargo and protective tarpaulin had been.

Several boxes of relief supplies lay scattered on the roadside but it was not immediately clear what they contained nor where the lorry was.

UNRWA was unable to reach north Gaza as the WFP reported last Friday that it, too, had been unable to reach northern Gaza City for the third time in a week.

WFP Country Director for Palestine, Matthew Hollingworth said “We only managed four convoys in the month of January, that’s around 35 truckloads of food (and) enough for almost 130,000 people”.

“(It’s) really not enough to prevent a famine and we know levels of hunger in Gaza are getting at that level now,” he said.

Mr. Hollingworth described how “desperately hard” it is for aid convoys to move around the shattered enclave after almost four months of non-stop Israeli bombardment in a video post on X from central Gaza.

“There’s more damage everywhere, rubble, roads are closed, but there’s also kinetic active fighting in various areas on the Strip,” he said.

“Getting through checkpoints and simply moving through Gaza from the southern governorate of Rafah had now extremely difficult, as there were “literally a million and a half people stuck in Rafah. They’re all desperate and they’re all asking for assistance”.

WFP reached 1.4 million people with emergency rations, canned food, wheat flour and hot meals but far more assistance is needed urgently.

UNRWA reported that some 75 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced.

Over half are children who are among those who face “acute shortages of food, water, shelter and medicine”, the UN agency warned.

It added that intense fighting around Khan Younis “continues to drive thousands of people into the southern town of Rafah, which is already hosting over half of Gaza’s population. Most are living in makeshift structures, tents, or out in the open.”

OCHA noted that residential blocks across Gaza have to be destroyed by Israeli forces, including in southern, eastern and central Khan Younis and in Gaza City’s Al Sabra neighbourhood. No casualties were reported in the latest incidents.

Over 800 government officials from western nations published an open letter denouncing their countries’ support for the war at the weekend, describing it as “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century”.

The signatories are believed to be high-ranking civil servants and diplomats from the US and 14 European countries including France, Germany, the UK and Switzerland.

They protested that their governments had supported Israel “without real conditions nor responsibilities”, resulted in “tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths” and the “deliberate” blocking of aid which has left “thousands of civilians at risk of starvation and slow death”.

The development came as regional tensions grew with US and UK airstrikes on pro-Iranian militia in Iraq and Syria last Friday after three American service personnel died in an attack on a US base in Jordan.

The situation might escalate further because of events in the Red Sea, where Houthi fighters have targeted shipping with alleged links to Israel.

The calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all hostages remained big concerns.

According to UN on Israel’s border with Lebanon, cross-border exchanges of fire with Hezbollah have also added to concerns over regional instability.

The latest death toll from the war by Hamas-led terror attacks on 7 October that left some 1,200 people butchered and another 250 taken hostage, is at least 27,365 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 66,630 were injured, according to the enclave’s health authorities.

OCHA noted that 223 soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive in Gaza and 1,296 soldiers injured, citing the Israeli military.