Aid missions rejected by Israel nearly doubled in August: UN
The United Nations humanitarian affairs office says Israel nearly doubled its rejections of aid missions in Gaza this month despite calls for much more assistance for desperate Palestinians.
“In August, the number of humanitarian missions and movements within Gaza that have been denied access by Israeli authorities has doubled in the north (68 vs 30) and almost doubled in the south (99 vs 53) compared with July,” the group said in a situation update.
“Between 1 and 29 August, out of the 199 planned humanitarian missions coordinated with the Israeli authorities for northern Gaza, 74 (37 percent) were facilitated, 68 (34 percent) were denied access, 42 (21 percent) were impeded (including missions that succeeded), and 15 (8 percent) were cancelled due to logistical, operational, or security issues.”
The International Court of Justice has issued numerous legally binding orders for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, but Israeli authorities have instead consistently blocked large portions of humanitarian assistance.
Israel offering a three-day pause for vaccinations ‘a sick joke’
The fact that the “international community is begging Israel to vaccine children tells you to what extent this war has become immoral and genocidal”, Dr Tamer Qarmout, an associate professor in public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera.
Rather than allow temporary pauses for polio vaccinations, he said Israel’s war on Gaza needs to end he said.
“The health sector in Gaza has been systematically destroyed and targeted,” he said, adding that a three-day pause “will never be enough to vaccinate 30 or 40 percent of Gaza’s population, which are young and children”.
He described it as “a sick joke by the Israelis to say, we offer you three days to vaccine children, knowing that the entire health sector has been destroyed” with no clinics and “no basic conditions whatsoever to provide this vaccine.”
