A UN effort to deliver critical food aid to northern Gaza has been paused because of a breakdown in public order amid acute “hunger and desperation” across the battered territory.
The UN’s World Food Programme was forced to suspend plans to send 10 convoys of food aid into northern Gaza this week after chaotic scenes over the weekend, with crowds looting lorries. A driver was beaten and gunfire was reported.
The agency said in a statement: “A large-scale expansion of the flow of assistance to northern Gaza is urgently needed to avoid disaster … Gaza is hanging by a thread and WFP must be enabled to reverse the path towards famine for thousands of desperately hungry people.”
The UN has said Gaza’s population of 2.4 million was on the brink of famine and predicted an “explosion” of child deaths after months of war.
Aid agencies said last month that there were likely to be “pockets of famine” in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people are living in the ruins of former homes with almost no functioning infrastructure.
Heavy fighting continued in Gaza on Wednesday, a day after a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire was blocked by a US veto. Washington argued that the resolution would have imperilled efforts to free hostages.
“We can’t take it any more,” said Ahmad, a resident of Gaza City, where entire blocks have been reduced to rubble and streets are pitted with craters. “We do not have flour, we don’t even know where to go in this cold weather. We demand a ceasefire. We want to live.”
The UN has said that between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these, the UN said “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access and nine were postponed”.
More Israeli strikes hit targets in Gaza over the last 24 hours, killing 103 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, which put the overall death toll at 29,313.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah said it received 44 bodies after multiple strikes in central Gaza. Associated Press reporters saw bodies arriving in ambulances and private vehicles.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders said two people were killed when a shelter housing staff was struck during an Israeli operation in an area where Palestinians had been told to seek shelter.
“While details are still emerging, ambulance crews have now reached the site, where at least two family members of our colleagues have been killed and six people wounded. We are horrified by what has taken place,” the group said in a post on social media.
Israel has said it takes precautions to avoid civilian casualties and blamed Hamas for using civilians as “human shields”. The militant Islamist organisation denies the charge.
The war, now in its fifth month, was triggered by Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year, in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.
As Israeli forces have expanded ground operations steadily southwards over the past four months, the city of Rafah – situated on the border with Egypt, and before the conflict home to about 280,000 people – has become the last refuge for more than half of the strip’s population.
Aid groups say a ground offensive could turn Rafah, now packed with crowded shelters and makeshift tents, into a graveyard, and the US has said the vast numbers of displaced civilians must first be moved out of harm’s way.
Two-thirds of Gaza is under Israeli evacuation orders and it is unclear how civilians are expected to flee any offensive.
On Monday the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed victory in the weeks-long fight for the central town of Khan Younis and nearby refugee camps, making the prospect of a Rafah ground attack more likely.
Seven patients died at Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital after power cuts caused by a days-long Israeli raid on the premises, the World Health Organization said earlier this week.
A spokesperson for Gaza health ministry on Wednesday described the “unbearable” situation at Nasser hospital, which he said posed “a real danger to the lives of medical staff and patients”. He described a lack of oxygen and basic supplies, piles of medical waste and flooding by sewage water.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has said the army will keep fighting until it has destroyed Hamas and recovered the remaining 130 hostages, about 30 of whom are feared dead.
On a visit on Tuesday to military drone specialists, Netanyahu said Israel wanted to “achieve another release” of hostages but was “not prepared to pay any price, certainly not the delusional prices that Hamas is demanding of us, the meaning of which is the defeat of the state of Israel”.
Benny Gantz, an opposition politician brought into Israel’s war cabinet by Netanyahu at the beginning of the conflict, has said that unless Hamas releases the captives by the start of Ramadan, about 10 March, the army will keep fighting during the Muslim holy month, including in Rafah.
Overnight the IDF announced the death of another soldier, bringing the total to 237 officially recorded as killed in Gaza since the start of the Israeli offensive.
Major powers have tried to negotiate an end to the crisis but have made limited progress. Israel’s parliament on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to back a statement from the Netanyahu government that it would formally oppose international attempts at what it called the “unilateral recognition” of a Palestinian state after the war ends.
Qatar and Egypt have proposed a plan to free hostages in return for a pause in fighting and the release of Palestinian prisoners, but Israel and Hamas have so far failed to agree on a deal.
The war has set off clashes elsewhere in the Middle East, drawing in Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Israel has traded almost daily cross-border fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and US and British forces have hit Yemen’s Houthi rebels to deter their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
In Syria, state television said an Israeli missile strike killed at least two people in Damascus. Israel declined to comment.
Violence has also flared in the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli army said its troops killed three Palestinian militants during an overnight raid in the northern city of Jenin.