UN warns aid ‘not getting to people’ in Gaza, ‘children starving’

The UN humanitarian office and World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday warned aid is “not getting to people” in Gaza, and as a result “children are starving.”

“They are certainly not getting the amount that they desperately need to prevent a famine,” Jens Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office, said at a UN briefing in Geneva.

To Anadolu’s question on the seizure of the Philadelphi Corridor by Israel, Laerke said: “More military action is not normally helpful for humanitarian action.”

He added that it is “difficult to predict” how it would affect the humanitarian operations as a whole, considering the “very dynamic” situation on the ground with armed forces moving around to different areas.

“We want military action to cease altogether. We want to have a humanitarian pause,” he urged and added: “That is the only way we can actually do our jobs properly.”

The Israeli army on Wednesday announced that it took control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border. Philadelphi Corridor is a 14-kilometer-long narrow strip of land that serves as a buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border and is guaranteed by the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty of 1979.

When asked by Anadolu about the number of trucks entering through Kerem Shalom crossing following the closure of Rafah and the broken-apart US pier, he said that he would not go into truck numbers right now as “these truck numbers, we will never be able to make them align; Israel to say something, we count something else.”

He also described the non-functionality of the US floating dock as “bad news,” but he said that it was “never intended and was never realistic to be the major pipeline of aid. It could have been an addition.”