Photo credit: the Guardian
Due to lack of supplies and insecurity, the United Nations has suspended food distribution to Rafah.
The Guardian reports that it also said that no aid trucks have entered the territory in the past two days through a floating pier set up by the United States for sea deliveries.
Thr UN warned that the project may fail unless Israel starts providing the conditions humanitarian groups need to operate freely.
Hundreds of thousands of people still remain in Rafah after Israel has launched an intensified assault there on 6 May. But relief agencies say food aid deliveries have been reduced to a trickle.
A spokesman for World Food Programme, Aberdeen Etefa, warned that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse “.
She said unless food and other supplies start entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread”.
UNRWA, which is the main agency for Palestinian refugees, has announced the suspension of distributors in Rafah.
UN spokesperson Stephanie Dujarric said the UNRWA distribution centre and WFP’s warehouse in Rafah were not accessible due to the ongoing military operations.
The WFP, according to Etefa, has also stopped distribution in Rafah after exhausting its stocks. However, it still passes out hot meals in central Gaza and “limited distributions” of reduced food parcels in the same area. But “food parcel stocks will run out within days”, she said.
The US has depicted the £250m floating pier it erected on the Gaza coast as a potential route for accelerated deliveries. Although the first 10 trucks rolled off a ship on to the pier on Friday and were taken to a WFP warehouse, a delivery on Saturday of 11 trucks was stopped by crowds of Palestinians who took the supplies. Only 5 of the trucks made it to the warehouse.
