United Nations aid operations in Gaza ground to a halt on Monday after Israel issued new evacuation orders on Sunday for Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip where the UN operations centre was located, said a senior UN official.
The evacuation order came as the UN prepares to begin on Saturday a campaign to vaccinate an estimated 640,000 children in Gaza, where the World Health Organisation said a 10-month-old baby had been paralysed by the type 2 poliovirus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
“We’re unable to deliver today with the conditions that we’re in,” said the senior UN official. “As of this morning, we’re not operating in Gaza.”
The organisation had relocated its main operations centre for the Gaza Strip and most of its personnel to Deir Al-Balah, said the official, after Israel ordered the evacuation of Rafah in the south of Gaza several months ago.
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“Where do we move now?” asked the official, adding that UN staff had to be moved so quickly that equipment was left behind.
The Israeli military’s humanitarian unit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The UN official said staff on the ground had been directed to try to find a way to keep operating. He said operations had not been formally suspended.
“We’re not leaving [Gaza] because the people need us there,” said the official. “We’re trying to balance the need of the population with the need for safety and security of the UN personnel.”
Sam Rose, a senior field director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), said it was still managing to deliver health and other services, but noted that while Unrwa operated differently from the rest of the UN system it still faced the same challenges.
“We are being squeezed into ever smaller areas of Gaza,” he said. “The humanitarian zone declared by Israel has shrunk. It’s now about 11 per cent of the entire Gaza Strip. But this isn’t 11 per cent of land that is fit for habitation, fit for services, fit for life.”
The war in the Gaza Strip began on October 7th, 2023, when, according to Israel, Hamas gunmen killed about 1,200 people and abducted some 250 hostages.
Since then, Israel’s military has levelled swathes of the Palestinian enclave, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million people from their homes, giving rise to deadly hunger and disease and killing at least 40,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
“The humanitarian response here is being completely strangled and limiting our ability of what we can do,” said Unrwa spokeswoman Louise Wateridge.
The UN has long complained of obstacles to getting aid into Gaza — Israel inspects and approves all trucks — and says it is also struggling to distribute aid amid “total lawlessness” within the enclave of 2.3 million people, where a global hunger monitor last month said there is a high risk of famine.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) said that in the past two months it “managed to bring in only half of the 24,000 metric tonnes of food aid required for operations serving 1.1 million people”. The WFP said it was hampered by worsening conflict, a limited number of border crossings and damaged roads.
Mr Rose said that more than 3,000 people would work on the polio vaccination campaign that is due to start on Saturday.
“Over 1,000 of them [will be] drawn from Unrwa, which is essentially the largest primary healthcare provider left in the Gaza Strip. The vaccines have come in. We’re calling for calm. We’re calling for humanitarian pauses,” he said. — Reuters
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