TANZANIA – Humanitarian aid to n orth Gaza, where Israel launched a ground offensive on Oct. 6, has largely been blocked for the past 66 days, the United Nations said Tuesday. That has left between 65,000 and 75,000 Palestinians without access to food, water, electricity or health care, according to the world body.
In the north, Israel has continued its siege on Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya with Palestinians living there largely denied aid, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA, said. Recently, it said, about 5,500 people were forcibly displaced from three schools in Beit Lahiya to Gaza City.
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Adding to the food crisis, only four U.N.-supported bakeries are operating throughout the Gaza Strip, all of them in Gaza City, OCHA said.
Sigrid Kaag, the senior U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council behind closed doors Tuesday afternoon that civilians trying to survive in Gaza face an “utterly devastating situation.”
She pointed to the breakdown in law and order and looting that has exacerbated a very dire situation and left the U.N. and many aid organizations unable to deliver food and other humanitarian essentials to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in need.
Kaag said she and other U.N. officials keep repeatedly asking Israel for access for convoys to north Gaza and elsewhere, to allow in commercial goods, to reopen the Rafah crossing from Egypt in the south, and to approve dual-use items.
Israel’s U.N. Mission said it had no comment on Kaag’s remarks.
The U.N. has established the logistics for an operation across Gaza, she said, but there is no substitute for political will that humanitarians don’t possess.
“Member states possess it,” Kaag said. And this is what she urged Security Council members and keeps urging the broader international community to press for — the political will to address Gaza’s worsening humanitarian crisis.