The United Nations has warned that Israel’s military incursion into Rafah and the closure of border crossings is a major setback for aid operations in the Gaza Strip, with serious implications for its people.
No aid trucks have entered Gaza since Sunday, the United Nations said Wednesday, as Israel sent tanks and troops to Rafah and blocked the two southern crossings where most of the aid has entered, at Rafah on the border. with Egypt, and near Kerem Shalom, on the border with Israel. .
Israel said the Kerem Shalom crossing reopened on Wednesday, but did not indicate when the Rafah crossing would reopen. The UN disputed Israel’s claim.
Fighting in the Rafah area and the closure of crossings caused aid efforts to revert, at least temporarily, to the conditions of the first weeks of the war, when an Israeli and Egyptian blockade prevented anything from entering Gaza, which which produced a desperate shortage of food. water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. Israel has described the military action it began Monday as a limited raid on Rafah that took control of the border crossing, not the full-blown offensive it has promised to carry out, despite warnings from the United States and aid groups. that it would be a humanitarian catastrophe.
U.N. officials said the conditions threaten to halt all their humanitarian operations in Gaza.
Up to a million displaced people from other parts of Gaza, more than half of them children, have sought refuge there, living in squalid conditions and dependent on international aid efforts.
“Rafah is the epicenter of humanitarian operations in Gaza,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Tuesday. “Attacking Rafah will further impact our efforts to support people in desperate humanitarian situations as famine looms.”
Before the war began last October, about 500 additional aid trucks and commercial trucks were carrying supplies to Gaza, home to about 2.3 million people. Even after deliveries resumed, they were a fraction of the prewar level, as Israel kept most crossings closed, insisted on close inspection of every cargo and banned some supplies.
After intense international pressure on Israel, including from the United States, the average rose to more than 200 trucks of humanitarian aid per day in the second half of April and the first days of May, according to the United Nations, still well below from what aid agencies said. It was needed and what the Biden administration had asked for. No commercial trucks have entered Gaza since the war began in October.
For months, the United Nations and aid groups have also struggled to gain access and safe passage for their staff to work in Gaza, despite intense negotiations with Israel.
Now, U.N. officials say the limited progress they had made is in jeopardy.
“We are managing the entire aid operation opportunistically and not comprehensively: if there is something we can take advantage of, we will do it,” UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in an interview on Wednesday.
“We want to be able to work without being in the middle of a conflict zone and without the people we are trying to help being terrified,” he added.
A day earlier, the head of the UN humanitarian office for the Palestinian territories, Andrea De Domenico, said from Jerusalem in a video conference with journalists that fuel would run out within days, cutting communications, closing hospitals and stopping food distribution. and other essential items. aid.
Gaza’s power grid stopped working at the start of the war. The only power available now comes from generators, making fuel essential.
The presence of Israeli tanks and fighting around the Rafah border had made it impossible for the UN to access fuel at storage facilities in the area, De Domenico said. He added that people are fleeing Rafah to areas where there was no shelter, clean water or drainage.
“It is impossible to improve the existing situation in the new displacement sites without the entry of supplies and without the fuel to transport them to the places where people are concentrated,” De Domenico said.
If the area around the Rafah crossing becomes a battle zone, U.N. officials said, it would be nearly impossible to deliver and distribute aid.