Aug. 27 (UPI) — The United Nations said it had temporarily paused its humanitarian operations in Gaza due to the issuing of repeated evacuation orders by the Israeli military, making it impossible to continue.
The decision came after Israel Defense Forces ordered the U.N. to evacuate its main operations facility at Deir al-Balah, a senior U.N. official told a news briefing on Monday.
However, the official said U.N. security personnel were working with the Israeli authorities to restart the organization’s humanitarian work in Gaza at the earliest opportunity.
The parties were also negotiating to clear the way for the movement of aid, said the official.
All humanitarian actions are coordinated with Israel’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration but in a report released Monday, the U.N. said the CLA facilitated less than half of the humanitarian missions and movements the U.N. wanted to conduct in August and more than half of all missions and movements were delayed, obstructed or canceled altogether.
The issue is also impacting other Non-Governmental Organizations delivering aid and other services.
“The high number of aid missions that the Israeli authorities do not facilitate means that people who barely have the means to survive — access to clean drinking water, adequate food and shelter, to name a few — are often left with nothing at all,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. office’s Gaza mission, Told the New York Times.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Monday said what it called a “flurry” of recent orders for it to move from premises in Gaza for safety reasons, including five in five days between Aug. 19 and Aug. 24, was worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
OCHA warned that the volume of humanitarian food assistance brought into Gaza in July was already one of the lowest since the start of the conflict in October, saying that “ongoing intense fighting, damaged roads, a breakdown of law and order, and access challenges along the main humanitarian route” have resulted in severe shortages of food.
More than one million people in southern and central Gaza may not receive food rations for August, it said, amid a surge in the number of children with acute malnutrition, diagnosed via arm screenings.
The Israeli military had issued a further three new evacuation orders since Friday bringing the number of such orders since the beginning of the month to 16 and the total land area affected since the start of the conflict in October to 91%, OCHA said in a news release.
With only 11% of the strip not affected, most of the population is now crammed into an overcrowded, polluted area where services are poor, yet which is a little more secure than the rest of Gaza.
The latest orders affect 8,000 people in 19 neighborhoods in Northern Gaza and Deir al-Balah, many of whom have fled fighting elsewhere and are sheltering in 29 displacement centers.
“In Deir al-Balah, the orders have displaced U.N. humanitarian staff, non-governmental organizations and service providers, along with their families. These relocations took place at short notice and in dangerous conditions,” OCHA said.
It said it was especially concerned about an order issued Sunday for a part of Deir al Balah because it covers an area housing, or close by, so many aid facilities and critical infrastructure including 15 premises used by U.N. and NGO aid workers, four U.N. warehouses, the Al Aqsa hospital, two clinics, three wells, one water reservoir and one desalination plant.
“This effectively upends a whole lifesaving humanitarian hub that was set up in Deir al-Balah following its evacuation from Rafah back in May, and it severely impacts our ability to deliver essential support and services,” OCHA said.
In a post on X, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that insecurity and lack of safe access for patients, health workers, ambulances and suppliers posed by the proximity of evacuation targets to medical points and hospitals risked them ceasing to operate.
“This must be avoided at all costs. People have barely any options left, after being uprooted multiple times, to find shelter, health and other services in an already crammed and challenging environment,” said Ghebreyesus.
“Protection and dignity, not repeated uprooting, is what Gaza’s people desperately need now.”
The World Food Program added its voice to the dire warnings saying its operations had also been severely impacted by an intensification of the fighting, too few border crossings and damaged roads to the extent it had been able to bring in only half of the 24,000 tons of food required for the 1.1 million people it serves and had been forced to cut rations.
Delays in authorizing movement into and within Gaza and requests being denied on a routine basis were a daily frustration for aid workers with WFP stressing the upheaval caused to people by evacuation orders also disrupted aid centers on whom they depend for support, including WFP-backed food distributions and community kitchens.
However, WFP said Israeli bureaucracy was not their only problem with looting and issues of public order a growing complication that was particularly affecting convoys stationary at checkpoints where they are often delayed for hours.
When trucks do move they only crawl due to cratered and debris-strewn roads that the WFP warned would become impassable when the rains and flooding arrive with the coming winter.