JERUSALEM: The United Nations is asking donors for over USD 4 billion to fund humanitarian operations in the Palestinian territories, most of it earmarked for war-ravaged Gaza.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs also called for the “lifting all impediments to the entry of aid” in its appeal issued Wednesday.
UN agencies say aid operations in Gaza are hindered by Israeli restrictions and the breakdown of law and order. Israel says it allows enough aid to enter and blames the UN for not distributing it within the territory.
The appeal for 2025 includes USD 3.6 billion for Gaza and about USD 450 million for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israel’s offensive, launched after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack, has destroyed vast areas of the besieged territory and displaced around 90 per cent of its population of 2.3 million. Many have been displaced multiple times and are now crammed into squalid tent camps with little in the way of food or other essentials. Most of the population relies on international aid.
Humanitarian aid to North Gaza has largely been blocked for the past 66 days, the United Nations has said. That has left between 65,000 and 75,000 Palestinians without access to food, water, electricity or health care.
In the north, Israel has continued its siege on Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya with Palestinians living there largely denied aid, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA, said on Tuesday. Recently, it said, about 5,500 people were forcibly displaced from three schools in Beit Lahiya to Gaza City.
Adding to the food crisis, only four UN-supported bakeries are currently operating throughout the Gaza Strip, all of them in Gaza City, OCHA said.
Sigrid Kaag, the senior UN humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, told reporters after briefing the UN Security Council behind closed doors Tuesday afternoon that civilians trying to survive in Gaza face an “utterly devastating situation.”
She pointed to the breakdown in law and order and looting that has exacerbated a very dire situation and left the UN and many aid organizations unable to deliver food and other humanitarian essentials to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in need.
Kaag said she and other UN officials keep repeatedly asking Israel for access for convoys to North Gaza and elsewhere, to allow in commercial goods, to reopen the Rafah crossing from Egypt in the south, and to approve dual-use items.
The UN has established the logistics for an operation across Gaza, she said, but there is no substitute for political will that humanitarians don’t possess.
“Member states possess it,” Kaag said. And this is what she urged Security Council members and keeps urging the broader international community to press for — the political will to address Gaza’s worsening humanitarian crisis.
