An all-out Israeli offensive on Rafah could spell the end of the U.N.’s cash-strapped and over-stressed humanitarian relief effort for Palestinians trapped in Gaza, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned.
More broadly the entire humanitarian aid system is Gaza is "on its knees," World Health Organization spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters on Friday while confirming that official hospital records show a 10th Palestinian child in Gaza had starved to death.
Calling it "a very sad threshold," on par with the gravity of reaching 30,000 deaths in Gaza, Lindmeier noted that the unofficial numbers "unfortunately, can be expected to be higher" than what has been reported to the U.N. health agency.
"All the lifelines in Gaza have more or less been cut," he emphasized. "People are so desperate for food, for fresh water, for any supplies, that they risk their lives in getting any food, any supplies to support their children, to support themselves. This is the real drama. This is the real catastrophe here."
More than 100 people were killed and at least 700 others injured when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd waiting for humanitarian aid, officials said. Refugees International said it was calling for "an immediate independent investigation into the apparent mass killing of civilians today by the Israeli military during an attempted aid distribution in Gaza City."
Israel said a stampede caused some of the casualties when people rushed to reach a convoy of trucks. At least 30,035 Palestinian civilians and combatants have been killed and 70,457 others wounded as a result of Israeli attacks in Gaza since Oct. 7, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported.
"Even after close to five months of brutal hostilities, Gaza still has the ability to shock us," said Martin Griffiths, the U.N.'s top relief official.
At the U.N. Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva at the start of its first high-level session this year, Guterres said any escalation in Israeli Defense Forces' ground operations “would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there; it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programs.”
Humanitarian workers in the besieged enclave say conditions are only growing worse as aid money runs dry, food shipments are delayed, medicine is scarce and the fierce fighting continues, with no end in sight.
Doctors, trapped for weeks inside the besieged Al Amal hospital in southern Gaza and working and living in hellish conditions, say they have scant hope, no medicine and little communication with the outside world.
“Life is very difficult here,” said Dr. Haidar Al-Qudra, the hospital manager. The World Health Organization reports that a mere one-third of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are “partially functioning.”
The others were demolished or damaged beyond use in Israel’s bombing campaign aimed at destroying the enclave’s infrastructure. Israel maintains that Hamas terrorists operate from the hospitals, a claim that medical professionals and Palestinian authorities say is false.
“We are surrounded now, and patients cannot reach the hospital because they are not allowed to walk in the streets near the hospital,” Al-Qudra said. “Our ambulances now cannot move outside the hospital.”
'Desperate conditions' for all
The head the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the embattled agency founded in 1949 and known as UNRWA, reports that humanitarian aid delivered to Gaza in February has been about half of what entered the occupied territory in January.
“Aid was supposed to increase, not decrease,” said UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, so that Gaza’s 2 million people who are “living in desperate conditions" could have their huge needs met.
He listed some of the obstacles: a lack of political will, the regular closing of the two crossing points into the occupied territory, and insecurity due to military operations and the collapse of civil order.
A ceasefire and lifting the siege to allow the flow of lifesaving aid and commercial supplies are “long overdue,” he said.
Lazzarini’s agency has long been embroiled in controversy, with critics accusing the agency of perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem rather than working towards a sustainable solution.
A number of major donor nations, including the United States, cut UNRWA's funding earlier this year after Israeli officials asserted that some of its U.N. workers were members of Hamas involved in last October’s surprise terror attack on Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 others taken hostage.
U.N. investigators looking into the allegations visited UNRWA headquarters in Amman, Jordan, and were planning on traveling to Israel to meet with officials there.
Meanwhile, a group of 17 non-governmental organizations in the European Union issued a joint appeal for governments to resume UNRWA funding, saying that other aid agencies are not equipped to take over the massive humanitarian aid response needed in Gaza.
Given the current crisis many NGOs “will struggle to even maintain their current operations without UNRWA’s partnership and support,” the aid groups said.
The combination of aid commitments coming up short, restricted access to Palestinian civilians trapped in the Gaza Strip, ongoing battles between Hamas and Israeli Defense Forces, and Israel’s bombing campaign has left more than a half-million people in Gaza on the verge of starvation, U.N. officials told the U.N. Security Council.
“If nothing is done, we fear widespread famine in Gaza is almost inevitable,” said Ramesh Rajasingham, director of the coordination division of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, in Geneva.
Algeria’s U.N. Ambassador Amar Benjama accused Israel of using starvation as a tool of war, saying the continuing attacks on Gaza and the people who live there “is not a war against Hamas; it is a collective punishment for the Palestinian civilian people.”
The 15-nation Security Council must demand an immediate ceasefire, Benjama said, otherwise “our inaction equals complicity in this crime.”
Since the Oct. 7 start of the hostilities, the council – which deals with international peace and security and is considered the most powerful arm of the United Nations – has debated three resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, but the United States, Israel’s most staunch ally, has vetoed each effort.
In his address to the Human Rights Council, Guterres deplored the Security Council's stalemate, saying it is “often deadlocked, unable to act on the most significant peace and security issues of our time.”
He cited the New York-based council’s lack of unity regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's military operations in Gaza following terror attacks by Hamas. These divisions, he warns, have severely undermined its authority, possibly irreparably.
The U.N. chief said he is urging serious reform of the 15-member body’s “composition and working methods," which has long been a topic of debate at the world body and the 193 nations that are members.
This story has been updated with additional details.
