In what they call an "unprecedented emergency," United Nations agencies are warning that humanitarian operations throughout the Gaza Strip will cease within hours or days unless Israel reopens border crossings and allows critical fuel supplies into the Palestinian territory. Virtually no aid has entered Gaza in the past five days, and essentials such as fuel, food and water are in dangerously short supply.
In a social media post late Thursday, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said civilians in Gaza are being starved and killed, and the humanitarian community is being prevented from helping them.
"It means no aid," Griffiths said. "Our supplies are stuck. Our teams are stuck."
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which Griffiths heads, said Friday that ground incursions by Israeli security forces and heavy fighting continue to be reported in eastern Rafah, including around the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings.
âFor five days, no fuel and virtually no humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip, and we are scraping the bottom of the barrel,â Hamish Young, senior emergency coordinator for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in the Gaza Strip, said on Friday.
"This is already a huge issue for the population and for all humanitarian actors but in a matter of days, if not corrected, the lack of fuel could grind humanitarian operations to a halt", Young told journalists in Geneva, speaking from Rafah.
The UNICEF official said that he has been working on large-scale humanitarian emergencies for the last 30 years but that he has ânever been involved in a situation as devastating, complex or erratic as this.â
âWhen I arrived in Gaza in the middle of November, I was shocked by the severity of the impact of this conflict on children and, impossibly, it has continued to worsen,â he said.
Israeli forces seized control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza on Tuesday, bringing a halt to all aid shipments into Gaza. Israel said Wednesday it had reopened its Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza after several days of closure, but the UN said no humanitarian aid was going through.
COGAT, Israelâs Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, said aid was entering Gaza in other ways, noting that limited shipments of aid were going in through the Erez crossing.
But the World Food Programme (WFP) says it last received food supplies for Gaza in mid-April. Both WFP and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) warn they will ârun out of food for distribution in the south by Saturday.â
Meanwhile, humanitarian missions in northern Gaza continue to face severe access restrictions. As of Thursday, only nine out of 32 aid missions to northern Gaza this month had been facilitated by the Israeli authorities.
OCHA reports that the closure of the Rafah crossing in the south has cut off access to fuel for humanitarian operations and restricted the movement of staff as well as the entry of food and other life-saving humanitarian supplies.
Georgios Petropoulos, head of OCHAâs sub-office in Gaza, said the UN office and several other UN agencies went to the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings this week to assess the security situation and found that those highly militarized areas âare not secure, they are not safe, and they are not logistically viable.â
âThere is a lot of work that we have to do to get into that state. We are working hard with member states to find ways to bring in supplies and to make sure that aid workers can get in and out. For this solution to be sustainable, we have to bring some kind of predictability to the aid here,â he said, speaking from Rafah Friday.
âUnless these solutions come quickly, our aid activities, our communication, lack of fuel, banking activities will halt within the next two days. Not having fuel will affect life-critical sectors.â
Shortages have already created higher prices in the market, Petropoulos said, with vulnerable members of society being forced to make difficult or dangerous choices to access what is available.
The United Nations reports Israelâs recent evacuation orders, which are linked to military operations in Rafah, have led to the forcible displacement of at least 140,000 people, many of whom already have been displaced multiple times.
UNICEFâs Young said that Thursday he walked around al-Mawasi, the so-called humanitarian zone where Israel has told people in eastern Rafah they should move. He described the area as being jammed with trucks, buses, cars, and donkey carts loaded with people and their possessions.
âPeople I speak with tell me they are exhausted, terrified and know life in al-Mawasi will, again, impossibly, be harder. Families lack proper sanitation facilities, drinking water and shelter,â Young said.
âDisplaced people are subject to even greater risk of disease, infections, malnutrition, dehydration and other protection health concerns. Beyond a few mobile health points and field hospitals with limited capacity, the closest hospital is at least four kilometers away, assuming that the road to it is safe to use,â he said.
OCHA says within the next 24 hours, numerous health facilities will run out of fuel. Among those affected are five Ministry of Health-run hospitals, 28 ambulances, 17 primary health care centers, five field hospitals and 10 mobile clinics âwhich provide immunizations, trauma care and malnutrition services.â
Also on Friday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker TĂŒrk, reiterated his call on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups to lay down their arms immediately and to ensure that full, unhindered and sustained humanitarian assistance meeting the needs of all Palestinians in Gaza can reach everyone without delay.
"I deplore all hostile acts that jeopardize the entry and distribution of critically needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. The handful of land crossings into Gaza serve as lifelines for the supply of food, medicine, fuel and other necessities that must be allowed to reach the despairing and terrified population," TĂŒrk said in a statement.
He urged all parties to the conflict to ensure that crossings for civilians and goods necessary for the survival of the civilian population are not placed at risk through military operations.
âGiven the particular importance for civilians all across Gaza of the free flow of humanitarian aid, special care must be taken by both sides to ensure that these crossings remain safe and functional, and are neither direct targets of attack nor collaterally damaged,â the UN human rights chief said.
UN Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres on Friday renewed his plea to those in power to "show political courage and spare no effort" to reach an agreement to end the war in Gaza and free all hostages.
âA massive ground attack in Rafah would lead to an epic humanitarian disaster and pull the plug on our efforts to support people as famine looms,â Guterres told a news conference in Nairobi.
âInternational humanitarian law is unequivocal: civilians must be protected. In particular, vulnerable people unable to relocate from active fighting must be protected wherever they seek shelter â pregnant women, children, the injured, the sick, and older people, and people with disabilities,â he added.
On Saturday, the Israeli military reportedly ordered residents of central Rafah to evacuate, indicating a major expansion of its military operations in the south and threatening to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been repeatedly forced to flee.
Before the latest Israeli assault on Rafah, some 1.5 million Palestinians were trapped in a tiny strip of land with nowhere else to escape. The United Nations says there is nowhere safe in Gaza.
Half of Gaza's population - some 1.1 million people - face catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation, with famine now imminent or already occurring in northern Gaza. The entire population of the Gaza Strip - some 2.3 million people - suffers from high levels of acute food insecurity and is in urgent need of assistance.
More than 34,900 people, mostly women and children, have been killed and more than 78,600 others injured by Israeli security forces in Gaza since October 7 last year. Among the dead are more than 14,500 children and more than 9,500 women.
The fatalities include at least 260 aid workers, 191 UN staff, 493 health workers and 142 journalists. More than 10,000 others are feared buried under the rubble in Gaza and are presumed dead.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: As Rafah needs rise, humanitarian response forced to âscrape the bottom of the barrelâ, UNICEF, briefing notes, released May 10, 2024
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/rafah-needs-rise-humanitarian-response-forced-scrape-bottom-barrel
Full text: Comment by UN Human Rights Chief Volker TĂŒrk on Gaza crossings, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, press release, published May 10, 2024
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/05/comment-un-human-rights-chief-volker-turk-gaza-crossings