RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The World Food Program said Tuesday that it has suspended food deliveries to the isolated northern Gaza Strip as chaos grows across the territory and raises fears of possible famine. A study by the UN Children’s Fund warned that one in six children in the north is acutely malnourished.

According to UN figures, the number of aid trucks heading to the besieged area has more than halved in the last two weeks. Overwhelmed U.N. and aid workers said the reception and distribution of trucks was affected by Israel’s failure to ensure the safety of convoys amid its bombardment and ground offensive, as well as a breakdown in security as hungry Palestinians often overwhelm trucks for food to take with you.

The weakening of the relief operation threatens to deepen misery across the territory, where the Israeli air and ground offensive launched in response to the Hamas attack on October 7 has killed over 29,000 Palestinians, wiped out entire neighborhoods and wiped out more than 80% of Palestinians. of the population displaced by 2.3 million.

Over the past two days, there has been heavy fighting and airstrikes in areas of northern Gaza that, according to the Israeli military, were largely cleared of Hamas weeks ago. The military ordered the evacuation of two neighborhoods on the southern edge of Gaza City on Tuesday, an indication that militants are still mounting fierce resistance.

The north, including Gaza City, has been isolated since Israeli troops first invaded in late October. Large parts of the city lie in rubble, but several hundred thousand Palestinians remain largely cut off from aid.

They describe famine-like conditions in which families limit themselves to one meal a day, often mixing animal and bird food with grain to bake bread.

“The situation is beyond your imagination,” said Soad Abu Hussein, a widow and mother of five children seeking refuge in a school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Ayman Abu Awad, who lives in Zaytoun, said he eats one meal a day to save as much as possible for his four children.

“People ate whatever they found, including animal feed and spoiled bread,” he said.

SAME TO HUNGRY

The World Food Program said it had been forced to suspend aid to the north because of “utter chaos and violence caused by the breakdown of civil order.”

It said deliveries to the north were first halted three weeks ago after an aid truck was hit by a strike. An attempt was made to resume operations this week, but convoys faced gunfire and crowds of hungry people unpacking goods and beating a driver on Sunday and Monday.

WFP said it was working to resume deliveries as soon as possible. It called for the opening of border crossings for aid deliveries from Israel directly to the northern Gaza Strip and a better notification system to coordinate with the Israeli military.

It warned of a “precipitous slide into hunger and disease” and said: “People are already dying from hunger-related causes.”

UNICEF official Ted Chaiban said in a statement that Gaza “is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child mortality that would increase the already intolerable levels of child mortality in Gaza.”

The report released Monday by the Global Nutrition Cluster, a UNICEF-led aid agency, found that in 95% of Gaza households, adults limit their own food intake to ensure young children can eat, while 65% of families only eat one meal per month take day.

More than 90% of children under five in Gaza eat two or fewer food groups daily, referred to as severe food poverty, the report said. A similar percentage are affected by infectious diseases, with 70% having had diarrhea in the last two weeks. More than 80% of households lack clean and safe water.

In the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city, Rafah, where most humanitarian aid arrives, the acute malnutrition rate is 5%, compared to 15% in the northern Gaza Strip. Before the war, the rate was less than 1% across Gaza, the report said.

A UN report in December found that Gaza’s entire population is in a food crisis, with one in four people at risk of starvation.

STOP AUXILIARY CARS

Shortly after the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel blocked the entry of all food, water, fuel, medicine and other goods into Gaza. Under U.S. pressure, they allowed a small number of aid trucks from Egypt to enter the Rafah border crossing and opened a border crossing from Israel into the southern Gaza Strip, Kerem Shalom, in December.

The trucks have become virtually the only source of food and other supplies for Gaza’s population. However, according to figures from the UN Office for Humanitarian Coordination, known as OCHA, the average number of arrivals per day has fallen to 60 per day since February 9, from more than 140 daily in January.

U.N. officials said even at its peak, electricity was insufficient to feed the population and was well below the 500 trucks a day that came in before the war.

The cause of the crash was not initially clear. For weeks, right-wing Israeli demonstrators have demonstrated to block trucks and demand that no aid should be given to the people of the Gaza Strip. U.N. agencies have also complained that cumbersome Israeli procedures for searching trucks have slowed crossings.

But the chaos in Gaza appears to be a main cause.

Moshe Tetro, an official with COGAT, an Israeli military organization in charge of Palestinian civil affairs, said the shortage was because the U.N. and other aid agencies were unable to accept the trucks in Gaza or distribute them to the population. He said more than 450 trucks were waiting on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing, but no U.N. personnel had come to distribute them.

Eri Kaneko, a spokesman for OCHA, said the United Nations and other aid groups had been unable to regularly pick up aid at border crossings because of “lack of security and breakdown of law and order.” He said the Israeli military had a responsibility to facilitate distribution within the Gaza Strip and “the accumulation of aid at the border crossing is evidence of the lack of this enabling environment.”

In a rare public criticism of Israel, a senior U.S. envoy, David Satterfield, said this week that the targeted killings of Gaza police commanders guarding truck convoys had made it “virtually impossible” to safely distribute the goods.

In addition to the throngs of Palestinians crowding the convoys, aid workers say they are hampered by intense fighting, strikes on trucks and Israel’s failure to ensure the safety of supplies. According to the United Nations, from January 1 to February 12, Israel denied access to 51% of its planned aid shipments to northern Gaza.

NO END IN SIGHT

The war began when Hamas-led militants rampaged through communities in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostage. The militants still hold about 130 prisoners, about a quarter of whom are believed to be dead.

Qatar’s foreign ministry said it had confirmation that Hamas began delivering medicine to the hostages a month after they arrived in Gaza under a deal brokered between the Gulf state and France. The deal provides three months’ worth of medication for chronic illnesses for 45 of the hostages, as well as other medications and vitamins in exchange for medicine and humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel has vowed to expand its offensive into Rafah, where more than half of the territory’s 2.3 million residents have sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday that the total number of Palestinian deaths since October 7 had risen to 29,195. The ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its records, but says two-thirds of those killed were women and children. According to the ministry, over 69,000 Palestinians were injured.

Israel says it has killed over 10,000 Palestinian militants but has provided no evidence of the number. The military blames Hamas for the high number of civilian deaths because the militant group fights in densely populated neighborhoods. The military says 237 of its soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began in late October.

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Magdy reported from Cairo.

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