The head of the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency has said hungry people were stopping its aid trucks in Gaza and that it was getting harder to provide aid to people in its shelters because of crowding outside them, Reuters reports.
“People are stopping aid trucks, taking the food and eating it straight away,” Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA commissioner-general, told journalists at a refugee event in Geneva.
“Hunger has now emerged over the last few weeks and we meet more and more people who haven’t eaten for one, two or three days.”
UNRWA spokesperson Adnan Abu Hasna, while speaking to Al Jazeera from Rafah in southern Gaza, says about 100 trucks of aid are expected to arrive in the enclave today, about half of which will go to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
But this falls far short of what’s required, he said: “We need hundreds of trucks per day; there is a huge need. Without letting hundreds of trucks [in] […] we will suffer a lot, the population will suffer a lot.”
Abu Hasna said he lacked the words to describe what is needed in Gaza, from food and medicine to clothes and tents to house displaced families.
“It’s a catastrophe; it’s a tsunami, a humanitarian tsunami, actually — it’s not only a catastrophe,” he said.
