The World Food Program (WFP) announced on Tuesday (20) that it is halting food aid deliveries to northern Gaza until conditions in Palestinian-occupied territory allow safe distribution.
“The decision to stop deliveries to the north of the Gaza Strip was not an easy one, as we know that this means the situation there will deteriorate further and more people will be at risk of starving to death,” said WFP, the Gaza Strip’s food agency. United Nations, based in Rome, in a statement.
Three UN agencies – the WFP, the World Health Organization and Unicef – said on Monday that food and clean water are “incredibly scarce and disease is rife, resulting in an outbreak of acute malnutrition.” in Gaza, after more than four months of war between Israel and Hamas.
The food crisis is particularly severe in the north, where in January one in six children under two years of age was recorded as malnourished, and where “the situation is likely even more serious today,” the agencies said.
The WFP said it had resumed food deliveries to the north on Sunday (18), after having been suspended for three weeks due to an attack on a UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) truck and the “absence of a system humanitarian notification system in operation”.
A convoy of trucks began heading toward Gaza City but struggled to make progress as hungry crowds tried to attack the trucks, which then faced gunfire as they entered the city, the agency said.
The following day, WFP trucks were looted between Khan Younis in the south and Deir al Balah in central Gaza, and a driver was beaten, according to the agency.
The Israeli military began its offensive to eradicate Hamas in Gaza following the Islamic group's attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which, according to Israel, 1,200 people were killed and 253 were taken hostage by the Islamic militant group. Since then, more than 29,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health authorities in the Hamas-ruled Strip.
Source: CNN Brasil
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