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The World Food Programme will run out of supplies to provide food to the hundreds of thousands of people in north Gaza in a week and a half if Israel does not immediately allow a sharp increase in aid deliveries, its director in the Palestinian territories has warned.
The already catastrophic conditions in northern Gaza have deteriorated rapidly in recent days, as Israel launched a massive new offensive in the area and prevented the UN from providing any aid to the north for two weeks, according to the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Even before these moves, aid groups had warned that the roughly 400,000 people still estimated to be living in northern Gaza were facing acute food insecurity.
Amid mounting international alarm, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and secretary of defence Lloyd Austin wrote to Israeli officials this week, warning that US military aid to Israel could be at risk if it did not take steps to improve humanitarian conditions in the next 30 days.
But in an interview with the Financial Times, Antoine Renard, the WFP’s director in Palestine, said supplies were set to run out much sooner than that. He said the programme would no longer be able to provide warm meals to people in north Gaza in a week and a half and would be unable to provide bread in a week if aid deliveries did not jump dramatically.
“We are running short. If we don’t have more commodities coming in, and are not able to pick them up, we have a window of a week, a week and a half in which we can continue hot meals . . . For wheat flour [for bread] we can continue for a maximum of a week,” he said.
“A year after the start of the war, we are still faced with [running operations on a] day-to-day [basis]. That’s totally unsustainable,” he added.
Israel denies restricting supplies of aid to Gaza. On Wednesday the Israeli agency that overseas aid and commercial shipments to the enclave said that 50 trucks carrying food, water, and medical supplies provided by Jordan had been transferred to northern Gaza.
However, Renard said the amounts arriving were not enough, and that the WFP had only been able to collect 12 trucks of wheat flour on Wednesday — enough to feed only a fraction of the people still sheltering in the ruins of northern Gaza.
“The challenge that we have is that there is not enough goods coming in, even if it is slowly being reinstated . . . 12 trucks of wheat flour will not feed a population,” he said.
“We need to have predictability. Imagine if now today, you even don’t know whether you will have access to food tomorrow. That creates an anxiety for a population which is just unbearable after a year of war.”
People living in north Gaza say the conditions in recent days have been among the worst they have experienced over the past year.
“The current starvation is worse than the previous one. Today nothing is available, nothing stored in our [weakened] bodies, [there is] no grass growing on the ground, and canned food of any kind — if it is available — you need to have endless money to buy it,” said Ibrahim al-Kharabishy, a lawyer and father of four from Jabalia in northern Gaza.
“We have flour but no bread, because no one dares light a fire to bake and we can’t go out to collect firewood.”
Earlier this week, four Israeli human rights groups warned there were “alarming signs” that Israel was quietly starting to implement a controversial plan to break Hamas and force it to release the 101 Israeli hostages it still holds in Gaza. The plan would involve ordering civilians to leave the north of the enclave and then imposing a total siege on anyone who remained.
Israel’s military has denied that it is implementing the plan, which was proposed last month by a group of former generals.
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In their letter to Israeli officials, Blinken and Austin said that Israel must make sure there was “no policy of forced evacuation of civilians” from northern Gaza. They said it should also take other steps to improve conditions in the enclave, including allowing at least 350 trucks of aid to enter each day and increasing the number of crossings through which aid could enter.
Renard said the aid community had been calling for changes similar to the US demands for months. “A year into the war, we are still advocating [for the right] just to do our basic job. That is the challenge we have.”