“Acts reminiscent of the most serious international crimes” are being committed in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces continue to bomb and siege aid and prevent aid from reaching civilians, the UN’s humanitarian chief told a Security Council meeting. .
Speaking at the UNSC on Tuesday, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Interim Director-General Joyce Msuya described Israel’s month-long ground offensive and siege of northern Gaza as “an intensified, extreme and accelerated horror.” In the Palestinian Territories last year”.
Palestinian civilians have been forced out of their homes by Israeli forces and “forced to witness their families being killed, burned and buried alive” in the Gaza Strip, which Msuya described as a “wasteland of rubble.”
“We are witnessing acts reminiscent of the most serious international crimes,” she warned at the council meeting.
“There seems to be no end to the cruelty we see every day in Gaza,” she said firmly, criticizing Israel for blocking aid from reaching the besieged northern Gaza Strip.
“As I have briefed, Israeli authorities are preventing humanitarian aid from entering North Gaza. There, fighting continues and about 75,000 people are without water and food supplies,” she said.
Msuya also called for the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza after more than a year of Israeli attacks.
“If more than 70% of private homes were damaged or destroyed, what distinction was made and what precautions were taken?”
The UNSC meeting was convened in Guyana, Switzerland, Algeria and Slovenia following a report from international food security experts on Friday. International food security experts said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “very serious and rapidly deteriorating” and warned of imminent famine in some areas. north.
Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon said reports of a possible famine in northern Gaza were “baseless and slanderous.”
He told reporters ahead of the UNSC meeting that the situation in Gaza, including in North Korea, has been improving since October.
Earlier on Tuesday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said October this year marked the lowest level of humanitarian aid ever recorded in Gaza, adding that the war-torn territory “has not received any of the support it needs to support more than two million Palestinians.” “I couldn’t do it,” he said.
Dujarric said that in two months, the UN World Food Program (WFP) had been able to feed only half of the people relying on UN assistance in Gaza through reduced rations.
A convoy of 14 trucks was scheduled to deliver humanitarian supplies on Monday to a shelter for displaced people in Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza, and an Indonesian hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp, but only carried one truck, ready-to-eat meals and flour. The water reached two shelters.
Dujarric said other trucks in the aid convoy were unable to deliver supplies due to delays in approval from Israeli authorities and hungry people waiting along the convoy’s route.
The delivery was the first time in more than a month that Beit Hanoun residents had received food aid, he said.
WFP said it planned another mission to Beit Hanoun on Tuesday to reach the remaining shelters and hospitals, but Israel “rejected that mission.”
“We continue to call for the immediate opening of more land routes to Gaza and the lifting of administrative and physical restrictions within Gaza to enable efficient access to the most vulnerable people and areas,” Dujarric said.
Riyad Mansour, the UN special envoy for Palestine, told a UN Security Council meeting that Israel had decided to commit “famine as a method of war” in its ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
“Everything we warned about, everything Israel denies, is happening before our eyes,” he said.
“We are in the final stages of an organized plan to vacate large areas of Gaza from the Palestinian population.”
