GENEVA: The United Nations today confirmed that the Israeli occupation forces are blocking access to people in Gaza, complicating the task of delivering aid in what has become a lawless war zone.
Spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jens Laerke, said that it has become almost impossible to carry out operations to evacuate the sick and wounded individuals and deliver aid in the northern Gaza and increasingly difficult in the south.
In recent weeks, the Israeli occupation has prevented all aid convoys planned to reach the north. The last aid allowed in was on January 23, according to the World Health Organization.
What makes the situation more difficult is that even convoys that were previously cleared and inspected by the Israeli occupation authorities were repeatedly blocked or exposed to fire.
Laerke pointed out to an incident that occurred last Sunday when the occupation forces prevented a convoy organized by the World Health Organization and the P
alestinian Red Crescent to evacuate patients from the besieged Al-Amal Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip for seven hours, and detained a number of paramedics.
Laerke told reporters in Geneva, “Despite prior coordination of all staff and vehicles with the Israeli side, Israeli forces stopped the convoy led by the World Health Organization the moment it left the hospital and prevented it from moving for several hours.”
He added, “The Israeli army forced patients and employees out of the ambulances and stripped all the paramedics of their clothes.”
He said that the convoy was carrying 24 patients, and had to leave 31 other patients in Al-Amal Hospital, which stopped working after being subjected to forty attacks last month alone, which resulted in the death of at least 25 people.
‘Three Palestinian Red Crescent Society paramedics were later arrested, even though their personal data had been shared with Israeli forces beforehand,’ Laerke said, adding that only one of them had been
released so far.
He added, “The failure to provide adequate facilities for the delivery of aid throughout Gaza means that humanitarian workers are unacceptably and avoidably exposed to the risk of arrest, injury, or worse.”
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it suspended its operations in Gaza for 48 hours because Israel, the occupying power, failed to ensure the safety of its emergency medical teams.
Laerke said that the United Nations will continue to remind the Israeli occupation forces that they are obligated, at a minimum, to facilitate the ‘safe, smooth and rapid passage’ of aid missions, when informed of it.
Source: Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA