By Daniel Estrin, Aya Batrawy
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel has blocked nearly all food aid from entering northern Gaza for the past two weeks, leaving some 400,000 Palestinians there with no good option, United Nations aid agencies say: Stay and starve, or follow orders to flee to the south, where there’s no guarantee of safety or shelters for the displaced.
Israeli human rights groups Gisha, B’Tselem and others say Israel quietly adopted a starve-or-leave policy for northern Gaza — a policy that Israel may be backtracking from now with pressure from the U.S. to increase aid to the area. In a letter Sunday, the U.S. secretaries of state and defense warned Israel the U.S. might cut off military aid to Israel unless it increases humanitarian aid to Gaza in the coming month.
The Israeli military denies Israel is deliberately blocking food to the area.
U.N. officials say that fuel, needed for hospital generators, bakeries, ambulances and water plants, is also running low.
”The situation in north Gaza is like a catastrophe within a series of catastrophes,” said Jonathan Fowler, a spokesman for UNRWA, the U.N. agency overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza. “There’s simply nowhere safe in Gaza.”
The ongoing Israeli offensive in northern Gaza has also thrown into question whether U.N. agencies will be able to carry out the second phase of polio vaccinations for children there. The second round of vaccinations began in central Gaza this week.
U.N. agencies administer the second phase of polio vaccinations for children in Gaza on Tuesday.The first round of the campaign required humanitarian pauses in fighting and a pause in Israeli bombardment in specific areas where families were lining up to vaccinate their children from the highly contagious virus, which was found to be spreading in Gaza due to the destruction of water and sewage facilities in the war…
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