SLIDE INTO HUNGERThe World Food Program said it was forced to pause aid to the north because of “complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order.”It said it had first suspended deliveries to the north three weeks ago after a strike hit an aid truck. It tried resuming this week, but convoys on Sunday and Monday faced gunfire and crowds of hungry people stripping goods and beating one driver.WFP said it was working to resume deliveries as soon as possible. It called for the opening of crossing points for aid directly into northern Gaza from Israel and a better notification system to coordinate with the Israeli military.It warned of a “precipitous slide into hunger and disease,” saying, “People are already dying from hunger-related causes.”UNICEF official Ted Chaiban said in a statement that Gaza “is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths, which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza.”The report released Monday by the Global Nutrition Cluster, an aid partnership led by UNICEF, found that in 95% of Gaza’s households, adults were restricting their own food to ensure small children can eat, while 65% of families eat only one meal a day.More than 90% of children younger than 5 in Gaza eat two or fewer food groups a day, known as severe food poverty, the report said. A similar percentage are affected by infectious diseases, with 70% experiencing diarrhea in the last two weeks. More than 80% of homes lack clean and safe water.In Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where most humanitarian aid enters, the acute malnutrition rate is 5%, compared to 15% in northern Gaza. Before the war, the rate across Gaza was less than 1%, the report said.A U.N. report in December found that Gaza’s entire population is in a food crisis, with one in four facing starvation.DROP IN AID TRUCKSSoon after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Israel blocked entry of all food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies into Gaza. Under U.S. pressure, it began to allow a trickle of aid trucks to enter from Egypt at the Rafah crossing, and in December opened one crossing from Israel into southern Gaza, Kerem Shalom.The trucks have become virtually the sole source of food and other supplies for Gaza’s population. But the average number entering per day has fallen since Feb. 9 to 60 a day from more than 140 daily in January, according to figures from the U.N. office for humanitarian coordination, known as OCHA.Even at its height, U.N. officials said the flow was not enough to sustain the population and was far below the 500 trucks a day entering before the war.The cause of the drop was not immediately clear. For weeks, right-wing Israeli protesters have held demonstrations to block trucks, saying Gaza’s people should not be given aid. U.N. agencies have also complained that cumbersome Israeli procedures for searching trucks have slowed crossings.But chaos within Gaza appears to be a major cause.Moshe Tetro, an official with COGAT, an Israeli military body in charge of civilian Palestinian affairs, said the bottleneck was because the U.N. and other aid groups can’t accept the trucks in Gaza or distribute them to the population. He said more than 450 trucks were waiting on the Palestinian side of Kerem Shalom crossing, but no U.N. staff had come to distribute them.Eri Kaneko, a spokesperson for OCHA, said the U.N. and other aid groups have not been able to regularly pick up supplies at the crossing points because of “the lack of security and breakdown of law and order.” He said the Israeli military has a responsibility to facilitate distribution within Gaza, and “aid piling up at the crossing is evidence of an absence of this enabling environment.”In a rare public criticism of Israel, a top U.S. envoy, David Satterfield, said this week that its targeted killings of Gaza police commanders guarding truck convoys have made it “virtually impossible” to distribute the goods safely.Besides crowds of Palestinians swarming convoys, aid workers say they are hampered by heavy fighting, strikes hitting trucks and Israeli failure to guarantee deliveries’ safety. The U.N. says that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 12, Israel denied access to 51% of its planned aid deliveries to north Gaza.
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