UN humanitarian chief blasts Israel for ‘intentionally’ blocking assist to Gaza

Palestinians wait to obtain meals cooked by a charity kitchen, in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, Could 8, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score: Reuters

The United Nations’ prime humanitarian official blasted Israel on Tuesday (Could 13, 2025) for “intentionally and unashamedly” imposing inhumane circumstances on Palestinians, together with the chance of famine — one of many strongest condemnations by a high-ranking U.N. official throughout the battle in Gaza.

Tom Fletcher, head of the U.N. Workplace for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, briefed the Safety Council, describing this work as a “grim enterprise” since Israel started blocking all humanitarian assist from coming into Gaza greater than 10 weeks in the past.

He went so far as saying that the council should “act now” to “forestall genocide,” a declare that Israel vehemently denied.

“I ask you to mirror — for a second — on what motion we’ll inform future generations we every took to cease the twenty first century atrocity to which we bear day by day witness in Gaza,” stated Mr. Fletcher, a longtime British diplomat who took up the U.N. publish in November. “It’s a query we’ll hear, typically incredulous, typically livid — however at all times there — for the remainder of our lives.”

In response to Mr. Fletcher’s remarks, the Israeli mission to the U.N. stated that “Israel won’t settle for a humanitarian mechanism that props up the Hamas terror organisation that butchered our folks of their properties and communities.” Earlier than the blockade, the U.N. and different worldwide assist businesses dealt with transferring assist into the enclave.

The U.N. World Meals Program’s director for Gaza, Antoine Renard, advised The Related Press {that a} quarter of Gaza’s inhabitants is vulnerable to famine. That is regardless of all of the meals wanted to feed the territory’s inhabitants sitting in warehouses in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan — and most of it’s not even 25 miles (40 kilometres) away, he stated.

Mr. Renard stated WFP warehouses in Gaza are empty, and the company has gone from offering meals for 1 million folks on the finish of April to producing solely 250,000 meals day by day. The meals they’ll serve are “meaningless, in comparison with folks’s necessities,” he stated.

“Quickly, we’re going to talk about the truth that folks don’t even have entry to a meal,” Mr. Renard warned. “Is that the place we have to go to really increase the alarm? It’s now that we have to act.”

The warnings come after meals safety consultants stated Monday that Gaza will probably fall into famine if Israel doesn’t raise its blockade and cease its army marketing campaign. Practically half one million Palestinians are going through doable hunger, dwelling in “catastrophic” ranges of starvation, and 1 million others can barely get sufficient meals, in accordance with findings by the Built-in Meals Safety Part Classification, a number one worldwide authority on the severity of starvation crises.

“Israel has been overtly and openly blocking humanitarian assist for over two months now — that is engineered hunger,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, advised the Safety Council. “It’s the most inhumane type of torture and killing.”

Amid Israel’s blockade, AP obtained a proposal from a newly created group backed by the U.S., the Gaza Humanitarian Basis, to implement a brand new assist distribution system based mostly on plans much like these designed by Israel.

Israel has cited assist diversions by Hamas as cause for a brand new plan. The U.N. and assist teams have rejected Israel’s strikes to manage assist distribution.

“It’s a cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for additional violence and displacement,” Mr. Fletcher stated in regards to the proposal, including that it could exclude the disabled, ladies, youngsters and the aged.

Requested Tuesday when assist would get into Gaza, a spokesperson for the State Division repeated Israeli rhetoric that Hamas “bears accountability” for the humanitarian circumstances in Gaza. It is a declare that assist officers have repeatedly disputed.

“I’ll reiterate that we’re supportive of inventive options to get assist in there but additionally in a method that the help isn’t falling into the palms of Hamas, that it truly reaches the people who want it,” deputy spokesman Tommy Pigott advised reporters.

Mr. Renard stated “felony gangs,” not Hamas, had stripped WFP vehicles of provides between October and early January. He stated some taking of meals lately was not by gangs however folks with nothing to eat.

Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 folks in a shock Oct. 7, 2023, assault in southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 52,800 Palestinians, lots of them ladies and youngsters, in accordance with Gaza’s Well being Ministry, which doesn’t say how most of the useless have been combatants or civilians.

Israel says it has killed hundreds of militants, with out giving proof. The Israeli army on Tuesday struck what it stated was a Hamas “command and management heart” situated beneath a hospital within the southern Gaza metropolis of Khan Younis.

“I can let you know from having visited what’s left of Gaza’s medical system, that dying on this scale has a sound and a odor that doesn’t go away you,” the U.N.’s Mr. Fletcher stated.