WASHINGTON – Israel’s closure of key crossings into Gaza has cut off the main entry point for aid, and particularly fuel, rendering humanitarian operations all but impossible, a senior UN official warned.
“We lost the main entry point for all humanitarian aid,” said Andrea De Domenico, who heads the United Nations humanitarian office, OCHA, in the occupied Palestinian territories according to AFP.
On Tuesday, the Israeli army seized and closed down the Palestinian side of the nearby Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza after ordering residents of eastern Rafah to evacuate.
In an interview with AFP, De Domenico said that although Israel says it reopened Kerem Shalom, getting aid through remains extremely tricky.
“In Gaza there are no stocks” of fuel, De Domenico said.
“It is completely crippling the humanitarian operations.”
The warning comes amid increasing international calls to ramp up aid into Gaza, where famine has already begun in the north, according to World Food Programme executive director Cindy McCain.
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 34,904 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that that hospitals in southern Gaza had only “three days of fuel left”.
The head of the UN children’s agency (UNICEF), Catherine Russell, warned that if fuel is not allowed in, “the consequences will be felt almost immediately”.
“Life support services for premature babies will lose power; children and families will become dehydrated or consume dangerous water… Lost time will soon become lost lives.”
Other aid was also barely trickling in, De Domenico said.
While Israel announced Wednesday that was reopening the Kerem Shalom crossing, he lamented that there was no way to actually get safely through with aid trucks.
“It´s crazy… they have tanks all over the place, they have troops on the ground, they are bombarding the area east of Rafah and they want us to go out and pick up the fuel or commodities?
“They know that we simply cannot go.”
Without new supplies, De Domenico said that food stocks were running out, and medical treatment for malnourished children risked being suspended for want of supplies.
The exhaustion of aid agency stocks comes just as Israel’s incursion into eastern Rafah has forced an estimated 80,000 civilians onto the roads again in search of safety, most of them with little more than what they can carry.
“That means that you have 80,000 people that most probably need a lot of support,” he said.
The lack of fuel was a particular threat to those on the move with communications likely to be an early casualty.
