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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – U.N. aid operations in the Gaza Strip continued on Tuesday, a day after a senior U.N. official said humanitarian assistance had come to a standstill as a new Israeli evacuation order forced the closure of a major U.N. operations center.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday appeared to temper the unnamed UN official’s comments on Monday. Asked whether the situation in Gaza had caused the disruption of UN aid deliveries on Monday, Dujarric told reporters: “The situation in Gaza yesterday made our work extremely difficult.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “We’ve said from the beginning — this is to provide assistance by taking every opportunity, taking every gap that we can fill. So we’re evaluating every situation on a daily, hourly basis.”
UN security chief Gilles Michaud said on Tuesday that the Israeli military gave just a few hours’ notice over the weekend to more than 200 UN personnel to evacuate their offices and living quarters in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
He said the “timing could not be worse” as a mass polio vaccination campaign was about to begin, requiring a large number of UN staff to enter Gaza.
“The United Nations is determined to remain in Gaza. The delivery of humanitarian aid continues – a remarkable feat considering that we are operating at the highest edge of tolerable risk,” he said in a statement.
The International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that Israel’s new evacuation order had forced it and other humanitarian organizations to “cease aid operations because the situation of civilians has become extremely critical.”
“It is imperative that humanitarian actors can continue to carry out their work without the threat of displacement or military action,” the group said in a post on X. “We urge all parties to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access at all times.”
The current war in the Palestinian territories began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen stormed Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli statistics.
Since then, Israeli forces have razed large swathes of Palestine, forcing nearly 2.3 million Palestinians to flee their homes and unleashing deadly hunger and disease that has killed at least 40,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that Israel was increasingly demanding that the Gaza population “concentrate within the Israeli-designated Al Mawasi area, which covers only about 41 square kilometers, or approximately 11 percent of Gaza’s total area.”
The report says the camps have a density of 30,000 to 34,000 people per square kilometre (77,000 to 87,000 people per square mile), with overcrowding exacerbating severe shortages of basic resources such as water, sanitation and hygiene, health care, protection and shelter.
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