Photo credit: South China Morning
A convoy of 109 UN aid lorries carrying food was violently looted in Gaza on Saturday, according to the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
BBC reports that ninety-seven of the lorries were lost, and their drivers were forced at gunpoint to unload their aid after passing through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing with southern Gaza, in what is believed to have been one of the worst incidents of its kind.
Eyewitnesses said the convoy was attacked y masked men who threw grenades.
Unrwa Commissioner General Phillipe Lazzarini did not identify the perpetrators. However, he said the “total breakdown of civil order” in Gaza meant it had “become an impossible environment to operate in”.
According to Unrwa, without immediate intervention, severe food shortages are set to worsen for the two million people who depend on humanitarian aid to survive. A UN-backed assessment had warned earlier that there was a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas within the northeast Gaza Strip”.
It came after Israeli forces launched a major ground offensive in the north, and the UN said fewer aid lorries had entered Gaza last month than at any time since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Saturday’s looting was first reported by the Reuters news agency, which cited an Urnwa official in Gaza as saying that the convoy was instructed by Israeli authorities to “depart at short notice via an unfamiliar route” from Kerem Shalom.
Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry said its security staff killed “more than 20 members of gangs involved in stealing aid trucks” in an operation carried out in cooperation with “tribal committees”, a network of traditional family clans.
When asked at a news conference in Geneva on Monday, Lazzarini said he could not comment on the route. But he confirmed the looting and said, “We have been warning a long time ago about the total breakdown of civil order.
“Until four or five months ago, we still had local capacity, people who were escorting the convoy. This has completely gone, we are in an environment where local gangs, local families, are struggling among each other to take control of any business or any activities taking place in the south. It has become an impossible environment to operate in.”
Unrwa put out a separate statement on social media that accused Israeli authorities of continuing to “disregard their legal obligations under international law to ensure the population’s basic needs are met and to facilitate the safe delivery of aid”.
However, there was no immediate response from the Israeli military.
