UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that “aid has dried up, and the floodgates of horror have re-opened” in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has blocked all humanitarian aid and resumed its assault.
“Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop,” Guterres said on Tuesday.
In his address to journalists in New York, Guterres said Israel, as the occupying power, had obligations under international law to ensure that food and medical supplies get to the population.
That means Israel should facilitate relief programmes and ensure food, medical care, hygiene and public health standards in Gaza, he said. “None of that is happening today,” he added.
“The current path is a dead end—totally intolerable in the eyes of international law and history,” he said.
Guterres also rejected a new Israeli proposal to control aid deliveries in Gaza, saying it risks “further controlling and callously limiting aid down to the last calorie and grain of flour”.
“Let me be clear: We will not participate in any arrangement that does not fully respect the humanitarian principles: humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality,” Guterres said.
“More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies,” Guterres said in New York.
Guterres’s comments followed a joint statement issued by six UN agencies on Monday that said world leaders must act urgently to make sure food and aid supplies get to Palestinians in the Strip.
Gazans were “trapped, bombed and starved again”, the statement said.
“The latest ceasefire allowed us to achieve in 60 days what bombs, obstruction and lootings prevented us from doing in 470 days of war: life-saving supplies reaching nearly every part of Gaza,” it said.
While this offered a short respite, assertions that there is now enough food to feed all Palestinians in Gaza are far from the reality on the ground, and commodities are running extremely low.
The statement was signed by the heads of:
- OCHA—UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs
- Unicef—UN’s children’s agency
- WFP—World Food Programme
- WHO—World Health Organization
- Unrwa—UN agency for Palestinian refugees
- UNOPS—UN Office for Project Services
Because of the blockade, all UN-supported bakeries have closed, markets are empty of most fresh vegetables and hospitals are rationing painkillers and antibiotics.
The statement said that Gaza’s “partially functional health system is overwhelmed [and]… essential medical and trauma supplies are rapidly running out.”
With the tightened Israeli blockade on Gaza now in its second month, we appeal to world leaders to act—firmly, urgently and decisively—to ensure the basic principles of international humanitarian law are upheld.
Responding to the comments, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said there was no aid shortage in Gaza. “As always, you don’t let the facts get in the way when spreading slander against Israel,” spokesman Oren Marmorstein said.
“There is no shortage of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip—over 25,000 aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip in the 42 days of the cease fire,” he claimed.
On 2 March, Israel closed all the Palestinian enclave’s border crossings, halting the flow of much-needed humanitarian aid and further exacerbating the territory’s crises.
On March 18, Israel resumed its full-scale attacks on Gaza, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounded over 3,600, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
On Monday, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that he would maintain the total blockade on aid entering the Gaza Strip, vowing that “not even a grain of wheat will enter Gaza.”
Smotrich insisted on prioritising the complete defeat of Hamas over the release of Israeli captives.
“It’s good that the war has begun, and it’s unfortunate that it began this way, but we are changing the reality in the Middle East,” he said.
Israel has been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war during its attacks on the besieged enclave, with it being one of the main crimes that led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, in November.