UN humanitarians reported on Monday 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 reportedly killed,
stoking regional tensions in the Middle East.
“This morning a food convoy waiting to move into northern
Gaza was hit by Israeli naval gunfire; thankfully no-one was
injured,” said Tom White, Director of Affairs for
the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNWRA.
Accompanying the post on X, formerly Twitter, two photographs
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.
Gaza City’s plight
UNRWA’s bid to reach the beleaguered north came as the UN World
Food Programme (WFP) reported last Friday
that it, too, had been unable to reach northern Gaza City for the
third time in a week.
“We only managed four convoys in the month of January, that’s
around 35 truckloads of food (and) enough for almost 130,000
people,” said WFP Country Director for Palestine, Matthew
Hollingworth.
“(It’s) really not enough to prevent a famine and we know levels
of hunger in Gaza are getting at that level now,” the WFP officer
said.
In a video post on X from central Gaza, 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.
“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”.
To date, WFP reached around 1.4 million people with emergency
rations, canned food, wheat flour and hot meals but far more
assistance is needed urgently, the UN agency insisted.
Shortages of everything
The development comes as UNRWA reported that
some 75 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have
been displaced.
More than half are children who are among those who face “acute
shortages of food, water, shelter and medicine”, the UN agency
warned, adding that continued 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.”
According to the latest update on the
conflict from UN aid coordination office, OCHA, residential blocks
across Gaza have continued 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, OCHA noted.
War objectors
Meanwhile, some 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”, resulting 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”.
Escalation fears
The development came as regional tensions continued to ratchet
up, with US and UK strikes 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.
And amid continuing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release
of all hostages, concerns remained that the situation might
escalate further because of events in the Red Sea, where Houthi
fighters have targeted shipping with alleged links to Israel.
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, sparked 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 also noted that 223 soldiers have been
killed in the ground offensive in Gaza and 1,296
soldiers injured, citing the Israeli military.
