By Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA (Reuters) -The U.N. said on Friday aid convoys were struggling to reach famine-hit areas of north Gaza due to war-damaged roads and the continued closure of key routes into the enclave’s north despite a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants.
Around 560 metric tons of food had entered the Gaza Strip per day on average since the U.S.-brokered halt to two years of devastating war but this was still well below the scale of need, according to the U.N. World Food Programme.
With famine conditions in the Gaza City region, U.N. humanitarian affairs chief Tom Fletcher said this week thousands of aid vehicles would have to enter weekly to tackle widespread malnutrition, homelessness and a collapse of infrastructure.
“We’re still below what we need, but we’re getting there… The ceasefire has opened a narrow window of opportunity, and WFP is moving very quickly and swiftly to scale up food assistance,” WFP spokesperson Abeer Etefa told a news briefing in Geneva.
But the WFP said it had not begun distributions in Gaza City, pointing to the continued closure of two border crossings, Zikim and Erez, with Israel in the north of the enclave where the humanitarian debacle is most acute.
“Access to Gaza City and northern Gaza is extremely challenging,” Etefa said, saying the movement of convoys of wheat flour and ready-to-eat food parcels from the south of the territory was being hampered by broken or blocked roads.
“It is very important to have these openings in the north, this is where the famine took hold. To turn the tide on this famine…, it is very important to get these openings.”
Global medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said many relief agencies had not fully returned to the north, where hospitals are barely functioning, leaving many Gaza civilians still unable to access regular care.
Jacob Granger, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, described the case of a Gaza City woman with a shrapnel wound suffered during the war who was unable to get to a medical facility to change her dressings for five days earlier this month. When she managed to see an MSF nurse and her dressing was unfolded, the wound was infected with worms and maggots, Granger said.
Though small amounts of nutrition products have reached the north – the area of heaviest and most devastating fighting between Israel and Hamas – relief convoys were still unable to move significant quantities of food there.
Around 950 trucks entered south and central Gaza on Thursday via the Kerem Shalom and Kissufim crossings with Israel, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordination agency said, citing figures from Israel’s military aid agency COGAT presented to mediators.
That followed around 715 trucks that rolled into Gaza on Wednesday, including 16 bearing fuel and gas, OCHA said.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin, editing by Kirsti Knolle and Mark Heinrich)
