By Staff Reporter
Gaza’s entire population faces starvation, UN warns, with aid deliveries branded a ‘drip-feed’ amid dire crisis.
Gaza is the “hungriest place on Earth”, the United Nations has said, as Israel continues to block all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering the Strip, where famine stalks the entire Palestinian population, and the Israeli military relentlessly bombs the besieged enclave.
Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Friday that 100 percent of the 2.3-million population of Gaza is now on the verge of “catastrophic hunger”.
The “limited number of truckloads coming in [Gaza] is a trickle – it’s drip-feeding food,” Laerk said.
“The aid operation that we have ready to roll is being put in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations not only in the world today, but in recent history”, he added.
What paucity of aid is entering the enclave is under the control of a new, shadowy NGO backed by Israel and the United States – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
On Friday, sources at Gaza hospitals told Al Jazeera that 20 people were shot by Israeli troops as they desperately tried to get food at a GHF aid distribution point.
That distribution site, located near Israel’s Netzarim Corridor bisecting the territory, is the third to have been set up, after two distribution points were established in the southern city of Rafah.
