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UN tells Israel it will suspend aid operations across Gaza without improved safety
Senior United Nations officials have told Israel the organisation will suspend aid operations across Gaza unless urgent steps are taken to better protect humanitarian workers, two UN officials say.
Israeli attacks regularly target UN facilities. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 445 attacks by the Israeli military damaging 188 different UN facility premises have been reported since the start of the war.
The Israeli military has also killed 193 UN staff since October 7.
A letter sent to senior Israeli officials this month said Israel must provide UN workers with direct communication with Israeli forces on the ground in Gaza, among other steps, the officials said.
They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations with Israeli officials. The UN officials say there has been no final decision on suspending operations across Gaza and that talks with Israelis were ongoing.
The UN World Food Programme has already suspended aid delivery from a US-built pier in Gaza over security concerns.
Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza
Younis lays disorientated on a green mattress in Nasser Hospital, in southern Gaza. His long brown eyelashes rest delicately on his pale sunken face, as he drifts in and out of sleep.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy lies in his mother’s arms, clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue jogging bottoms hang off his emaciated legs, as his tiny ribcage protrudes from his billowy orange T-shirt.
“I call on people with conscience to help me find health care for my son, so that he can go back to normal,” his mother, Ghanima Juma’a, told CNN last week at the hospital in Khan Younis. “I am losing my son in front of my eyes.”
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‘Waiting for them to die, one by one’
Newborn babies and pregnant women are among the most at risk of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza, according to aid agencies and health workers. Undernourished mothers are more likely to give birth prematurely, with newborns dying because they weigh too little.
At the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, doctors were unable to keep baby Amal alive just four days after her birth.
CNN filmed the moments before her death, showing Amal drawing heavy breaths in an incubator, after her mother, Samaher, gave birth two months prematurely. Her tiny pink toes are covered in plastic tubes.
“These babies are dying. It is God’s decision, but it is caused by people,” her father, Ahmed Maqat, told CNN, after she died on Saturday. Samaher had endured months of her pregnancy without sleeping, eating or drinking, Maqat said.
“Everyone in these beds today is at risk of dying. We are waiting for them to die one by one,” he added, his voice quivering with grief. “We have no life.”
Dr Ahmed Kahlot, head of the incubators department at Kamal Adwan, told CNN that Samaher’s poor health meant her daughter was just “waiting for death.”
Many of those who do survive are too dehydrated and malnourished to breastfeed their children. But health workers told CNN there are few alternatives, with shortages of lactose free or soya milk for infants.
Another Palestinian in Kamal Adwan Hospital told CNN that her son, who suffers from an inflamed esophagus, is unable to access soya milk, which he needs in his condition. “He hardly sits,” she said of her 2-year-old child. “He cannot even crawl, cannot walk.”
Around 250 patients are receiving treatment for malnutrition at the hospital, and there are only two functioning stabilization centers for severely malnourished children in Gaza, OCHA reported earlier this month, endangering almost 3,000 children, who were receiving treatment for acute malnutrition in the south prior to the military escalation in Rafah.
