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SvennoJ on 08 March 2024
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UNRWA calls for ‘efficient’ aid delivery into Gaza through crossings

UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma says “There is an easier and cheaper way to bring in much-needed supplies into the Gaza Strip” after airdropped aid accidentally killed five people. “That is via the road including sending more trucks from Israel into the Gaza Strip,”

Touma told Al Jazeera. “It shouldn’t be this difficult. There are several crossing points that connect Israel to the Gaza Strip and this is what we used before the war started. “When there is a political will there is a way,” she said, adding so far, desperately needed supplies have not been cleared fast enough and “there needs to be much more” going into the strip.

A ceasefire is “long overdue”, Touma added, warning several parts of Gaza are at risk of famine.

Children in Gaza ‘do not have time to wait’ for US aid pier

Children in Gaza are dying from starvation and disease and cannot wait for the time it will take to build a temporary pier off the coast, or for airdropped aid to reach them, Save the Children says. “Children in Gaza cannot wait to eat. They are already dying from malnutrition and saving their lives is a matter of hours or days – not weeks,” Jason Lee, country director for the occupied territory, said in a statement to Al Jazeera.

“There is already a tried and tested system in place to effectively coordinate aid, but trucks of food and medicines that could save lives are waiting at crossings while children are starving just miles away,” Lee added.

“Airdrops, with no on-the-ground coordination of who it reaches, and maritime corridors like the one announced yesterday are no solutions to keep children alive. Neither are substitutes for unimpeded humanitarian assistance via the established land routes.”

Alternative methods of aid delivery are costly, inefficient, and “a distraction from the critical solution to save the lives of children and families in Gaza”, he said, calling for an immediate ceasefire.

US aid policy on Gaza ‘absurd’ given military support for Israel

A UN expert says American plans for a temporary port and recent air drops are “absurd” and “cynical” methods so long as military aid to Israel continues. Air drops in particular “will do very little to alleviate hunger malnutrition, and do nothing to slow down famine,” Michael Fakhri, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told reporters in Geneva.

He warned of chaos as starving people joust for supplies. He called the port and air drops methods of “last resort”. "The time when countries use air drops and these maritime piers is usually, if not always, in situations when you want to deliver humanitarian aid into enemy territory,” Fakhri said.



UN seeks fact-finding mission on torture of Palestinians in Israel

The UN special rapporteur on torture requested an investigation in Israel to take a deeper look at mounting evidence that the army is abusing Palestinian detainees. Alice Jill Edwards said she received allegations of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and war-ravaged Gaza.

“I’m calling on … Hamas, the state of Palestine, Israel to put their torture tools down, to really have a focus on peace and a prospect of living side-by-side as neighbours in the future,” she said.

Thousands have been detained – and are mostly held in administrative detention by Israel – across the occupied West Bank since the start of the war, and there have been many enforced disappearances of Palestinians in Gaza, especially the north.

Last edited by SvennoJ - on 08 March 2024