Aid entry points in the North are desperately needed.
No aid can reach from the Egyptian border and now people are forced to move North again.
More on why WFP decided to pause aid delivery to north Gaza
We’ve been reporting on a decision by the UN’s World Food Programme earlier to pause the distribution of humanitarian aid in north Gaza. In a statement, WFP told the story of an attempt to deliver aid this Sunday, saying that “the convoy was surrounded by crowds of hungry people close to the Wadi Gaza checkpoint.”
“First fending off multiple attempts by people trying to climb aboard our trucks, then facing gunfire once we entered Gaza City, our team was able to distribute a small quantity of the food along the way,” the statement continues, saying similar incidents resulted in a failure to complete its aid mission the day after, on Monday.
The WFP said the decision “has not been taken lightly, as we know it means the situation there will deteriorate further and more people risk dying of hunger”, and that it will resume delivery “as soon as possible”. In order to be able to resume delivery, it said, “significantly higher volumes of food” need to be allowed into the Gaza Strip from “multiple routes.”
“A functioning humanitarian notification system and a stable communication network are needed. And security, for our staff and partners as well as for the people we serve, must be facilitated,” WFP added. A recent UN report found that one in six children under the age of 2 in north Gaza are malnourished, based on screenings at heath centres.
Children collect spilled flour from the ground after Gaza aid chaos
Thousands of starving Palestinians gathering to receive aid scrambled to pick up spilled flour off the floor, when a food bag spilled. Then, they came under attack by Israeli forces.
A move to grant far-right Ben-Gvir power to shut down foreign media: Report
A report from Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that lawmaker Zvika Fogel, a member of the Jewish Power party and chairman of the country’s National Security Committee, has changed the wording of a bill so that the party’s leader, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, would be given final say over which media outlets would be allowed to operate in the country.
According to Haaretz, a draft law brought up in the Israeli parliament today would see the minister of communications given the power to order the closure of foreign media outlets that “he finds to be harmful to state security”, with the approval of the minister of national security, currently Ben-Gvir.
The power to shut down foreign media outlets is now in the hands of Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant.
Negotiations with Israel on Palestinian state formation a ‘mirage’
Munir Nuseibah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer from occupied East Jerusalem, tells Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut that Israel’s insistence on negotiating directly with Palestinians over the formation of an independent state of their own is disingenuous.
“This has been experimented [with] over the past three decades. Palestinians have been negotiating with Israel, and Israel doesn’t want to get anywhere with these negotiations,” he told Al Jazeera. “At the same time … Israel has been taking more land, expelling Palestinians from their homes and controlling their lives more,” he continued, citing a regime of occupation that numerous international organisations have deemed to be apartheid.
“What we can see today in the Gaza Strip, Israel has not even thought that apartheid is enough, now they are committing genocide,” he said. “So what should we wait for?” he asked the global community. “Should we wait until there are no more Palestinians to talk to?”
