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Israel has given a tour of a large storage site within Gaza containing what it claims to be 1,000 lorries-worth of aid that the United Nations (UN) has failed to deliver.
The move on Thursday intensified a row with the international community, which has become increasingly critical of starvation levels in the Strip.
Amid escalating warnings of famine, Israel has in recent days sought to blame the UN and major NGOs for not distributing available supplies, saying it has placed no restrictions on them doing so.
It released well-produced drone footage showing what appeared to be aid packages across a multiple-hectare site within the perimeter wire.
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Israeli journalists were subsequently shown around the facility near the Kerem Shalom crossing, with one senior IDF officer criticising the “famine narrative” he said was propagated by Hamas.
Col Abdullah Halabi, of the defence ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activity in the Territories unit, said: “The State of Israel allows the entry of humanitarian aid beyond the standards of international law, without restriction. As long as the international community makes an effort to bring in the aid, we will allow them to bring it in.”
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, reposted pictures of the footage on social media, saying: “UN food is either looted by Hamas or rots in the sun.”
But the UN has said that, in practice, Israel is not facilitating the distribution of its aid in Gaza.
Stéphane Dujarric, the UN spokesman, said the country was imposing “tremendous bureaucratic impediments” and “tremendous security impediments”.
He said: “Frankly I think there is a lack of willingness to allow us to do our work.”
This comes against a backdrop of severe denunciations of Israel’s conduct in Gaza by the UK, France, Australia, Canada and others.
On Thursday, Sir Keir Starmer condemned the “unspeakable” and “indefensible” suffering of Gazans, reiterating Labour’s support for a Palestinian state, while France went further by promising to formally recognise such an entity in September.
The full details of why the UN and its NGO partners are unable to deliver aid into Gaza are not clear.
But it is believed that the organisation had to adapt its delivery routes and methods from its traditional patterns because of the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation, and that Israel is not facilitating this on the ground.
On Thursday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the previous day, Israel had facilitated only eight of 16 requested movements of aid.
The UN believes that around one quarter of the Strip’s approximately two million residents are now facing famine.
Israel imposed a blockade of aid deliveries at the beginning of March, claiming that Hamas routinely seizes supplies and uses them to finance its terror operations and maintain control over the civilian population.
Since the end of May, a new system was opened using the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US contractor which requires civilians to walk to a handful of large purpose-built distribution centres to collect aid.
The system has been associated with repeated mass shootings, with the UN accusing Israel of killing more than 1,000 civilians near the sites.
Israel has rejected the claims, admitting only to firing warning shots or shots “near” Palestinians, and blaming Hamas for the chaos.
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Israeli army radio was reported citing a military official that Israel would allow foreign countries to parachute aid into Gaza starting on Friday.
A parallel prong of aid – principally delivered by the UN – is technically in place, but because of the fragmentation of Gazan society, the body is no longer able to safely deliver food, water, medical supplies and fuel into population centres in the way it did before March.
Trucks are routinely looted by desperate civilians or by armed gangs.
The situation has fuelled a bitter war of claim and counter-claim between Israel and the UN, whose relations were already at an all-time low.
Among the un-evidenced accusations levelled by anonymous Israeli government sources is that the UN has requested the Hamas-run “blue police” to escort its trucks.
On Friday, the row spilled over onto the BBC’s Today Programme when David Mencer, a spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, accused Nick Robinson of telling lies.
In a bad-tempered exchange, Mr Mencer described the UN programme as a “billion-dollar racket” and said any food shortages were engineered by Hamas.
He said Israel had offered to provide security to deliver the aid at the Kerem Shalom crossing, saying it would provide two weeks’ worth of food for every person in Gaza.
“The UN is working in cooperation with Hamas to restrict the amount of aid to its own people,” he claimed.
The spokesman did not give a reason for why the UN would deliberately restrict aid deliveries.
Credit: BBC Today Programme
The OCHA said, regarding Wednesday’s aid efforts: “The facilitation of humanitarian movements inside Gaza, out of 16 attempts to coordinate such movements yesterday, only eight were facilitated – including the collection and transfer of limited fuel.
“Two other movements were initially approved but then faced impediments on the ground, three were outright denied – including the retrieval of medical supplies – and the remaining three had to be cancelled by the organizers.
“OCHA and its partners emphasize that the aid that they have been able to bring into Gaza over the past two months is nowhere near sufficient to meet people’s survival needs.”
It comes as Medecins Sans Frontieres said the rate of malnutrition among young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women at its clinics in Gaza had tripled in the last two weeks, and now stood at 25 per cent.
Reuters reported that an analysis by the US agency for international development, completed in June, found no evidence of systematic theft of aid by Hamas.
The analysis examined 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May this year.
USAID has now been largely shut down, thanks to Donald Trump’s government spending cuts, and the leaked documents were heavily criticised by a state department spokesman.
It came as footage emerged appearing to show ultra-nationalist Israelis blocking the road to prevent aid trucks from getting into Gaza.
A spokesman for UNICEF, the UN humanitarian body for children, said Gaza was on the brink of running out of specialised therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children.
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