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The United Nations said Monday that Israel blocked or obstructed close to half of all coordinated humanitarian aid deliveries inside the Gaza Strip over a recent six-day window, raising fresh concerns about the flow of relief supplies under a ceasefire agreement.
Of roughly 50 aid movements coordinated with Israeli authorities between Feb. 6 and 11, only just over half were fully facilitated, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Five missions were denied outright, and 11 others, though approved, ran into major delays and other obstacles that left two of them only partially completed.
"And just today, we had two more denials," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
Beyond movement restrictions inside Gaza, the broader pipeline for getting aid into the territory is struggling at multiple points. Dujarric said shipments arriving from Jordan are confined to a route that forces cargo to be unloaded and reloaded several times. Consignments from Egypt routed through the Kerem Shalom/Karem Abu Salem crossing have faced high rejection rates, with fewer than 60 percent successfully offloaded between Feb. 4 and 10, despite what Dujarric described as a recent improvement.
Humanitarian operations "continue to face significant impediments," he warned.
Dujarric said UN teams in Gaza were continuing discussions with Israeli authorities to clarify the constraints and push for their resolution, though he offered no indication that a breakthrough was imminent.
The aid disruptions persist under a US-backed ceasefire agreement that has been in place since Oct. 10, which halted a war spanning more than two years. The conflict has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounded over 171,000 others since October 2023, according to local health authorities.
Even with the truce in effect, Israeli forces have committed hundreds of violations involving shelling and gunfire, killing 603 Palestinians and injuring 1,618 others since the agreement took hold, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
The pattern of obstruction documented by OCHA underscores the gap between the ceasefire's promise of relief and conditions on the ground, where a population ravaged by years of bombardment and siege remains heavily dependent on international assistance.
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