NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has halted the delivery of aid through the Karem Abu Salem crossing between the Israeli-occupied territories and Gaza because of security concerns, its chief said, as widespread hunger and deadly bombardments by the Zionist regime continue.
“We are pausing the delivery of aid through Kerem Shalom, the main crossing point for humanitarian aid into Gaza. The road out of this crossing has not been safe for months. On 16 November, a large convoy of aid trucks was stolen by armed gangs,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said in a post on X on Sunday.
“Yesterday, we tried to bring in a few food trucks on the same route. They were all taken,” he added, warning hunger was “rapidly deepening” in Gaza.
Lazzarini listed how the humanitarian operation had become “unnecessarily impossible” due to “the ongoing siege, hurdles from Israeli authorities, political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid, lack of safety on aid routes and targeting of local police”.
He called on the Zionist regime to ensure aid flowed to Gaza and said the regime “must refrain from attacks on humanitarian workers”.
On Thursday, the UN agency said “out of the 91 attempts the agency has made to deliver aid to besieged north Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 have been denied and 9 impeded.”
The occupying regime has been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war as it has restricted supplies of food, medicine and other essential data-x-items into Gaza since launching the war last October. More than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in nonstop bombardment since then.
Louise Wateridge, the UNRWA emergency officer, told Al Jazeera that the targeting of aid convoys has been happening since May.
“That has led to desperation of people, who don’t have what they need and it has led and forced criminal activities,” she stressed.
The pause in the delivery of aid also follows an Israeli attack on Saturday that killed three contractors of the U.S. charity World Central Kitchen (WCK). The Israeli military claimed one of the contractors was involved in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 operation.
However, the WCK said it had “no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties.”
The UN said last month that 333 aid workers had been killed since the start of the war in October of last year, 243 of them employees of UNRWA.
Israel, which imposed a total siege on Gaza in the early stages of the war last year, blames the inability of relief organizations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.
Palestinians in Gaza have told Al Jazeera of their confusion over how, in one of the most heavily surveilled territories on the planet, the presence of so many armed men could have gone undetected by Zionist troops.