Displaced Palestinian women and children queue for food and bread donations next to a destroyed building in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, on Nov. 30, 2023. (Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP)
GENEVA — The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency said on Thursday that crowds of hungry people were stopping its aid trucks in Gaza and helping themselves to the food, making it almost impossible to continue delivering aid.
"People are stopping aid in trucks, taking the food and eating it right away. And this is how desperate and hungry they are," Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA commissioner-general, told reporters at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva.
This means that hundreds of thousands of people in overcrowded UN shelters in southern Gaza are sometimes deprived of food because it is intercepted before they arrive, Lazzarini said, speaking after a trip to Gaza.
"Hunger has now emerged over the last few weeks and we meet more and more people who haven't eaten for one two or three days," he added.
"Because there is more and more of a breakdown of civil order and as long as humanitarian assistance remains a crumble compared to the immensity of the needs, the more this tension will continue, the more the environment is becoming impossible," he said.
The UN World Food Program says half of Gaza's population
of 2.3 million is starving as Israel's military assault on the
southern part of the enclave expands and people are cut off
from food, medicine and fuel.
GENEVA — The head of the UN
Palestinian refugee agency said on Thursday that crowds of
hungry people were stopping its aid trucks in Gaza and helping
themselves to the food, making it almost impossible to continue
delivering aid.
"People are stopping aid in trucks, taking the food and
eating it right away. And this is how desperate and hungry...