UN denies Hamas is diverting food aid to Gaza

The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) this Thursday denied that Hamas is redirecting food aid to Gaza, pointing instead to episodes caused by a hungry and desperate population.

At a press conference on the sidelines of the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, where he arrived on Wednesday directly from the Gaza Strip, Philippe Lazzarini once again made a presentation on the situation on the ground, which he has already described as “a real hell” emphasizing that the Palestinian population is currently experiencing something it has never experienced, despite all the hardships of recent decades: hunger.

“Everywhere you look, people are desperate, hungry and scared. And something completely new that I saw is that sometimes people stop the aid trucks, take out the food and eat it immediately. This shows how desperate and hungry they are,” the UN official said.

According to the head of UNRWA, “With the enormity of the needs and the little aid coming into Gaza, it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to reach our warehouses, which are overflowing, since there are tens of thousands of people abroad who are also desperately experiencing the same needs that assistance must also be provided.”

“And it has nothing to do with deviations [da ajuda]. This is due to the complete despair expressed by the people in the Gaza Strip. Hunger is something you have never known before, but in recent weeks it has appeared and we are finding more and more people who have not eaten for one, two or three days. That’s why we sometimes see people stopping trucks and immediately eating on the spot,” he said, denying that it was done by militants from the terrorist group Hamas.

In this regard, Lazzarini, addressing journalists, stressed the importance of checking facts, combating disinformation and debunking “repeated and sometimes gross accusations.”

“As Director of UNRWA, I experienced [as ‘fake news’] more than once, as our agency has also been one of the targets of disinformation in this war,” he said.

The day before, the UN representative had already emphasized that “the population of Gaza is currently concentrated in less than a third of the original territory, close to the border with Egypt,” warning that “it is unrealistic to think that people will remain resilient in the face of living conditions so uninhabitable.” especially when the border is so close.”

“The sight of a truck carrying humanitarian aid now causes chaos. People are hungry. They stop the truck, ask for food and eat it on the street. I witnessed this first hand when I entered the Gaza Strip on Monday evening. To call these scenes inhumane is an understatement. Civil order is being violated,” he said.

More than half the homes have been destroyed or damaged by the war in the Gaza Strip, where 1.9 million people – 85% of the population – have been forced from their homes, according to the UN.

According to the Hamas Health Ministry, more than 18,200 people were killed in the Gaza Strip, the vast majority of them women and children under 18, in Israeli bombings sparked by the Islamist Hamas movement’s attack on Israel on October 7, which caused about 1,200 deaths, most of them of whom are civilians.

In parallel with a campaign of devastating airstrikes, the Israeli army has been conducting a ground offensive against Hamas since October 27, initially concentrated in northern Gaza and then spreading throughout the territory.