United Nations aid operations in the Gaza Strip were suspended on Monday after an Israeli command forcibly expelled Palestinians from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where the United Nations operations centre is located.
The order came as the UN was preparing to launch a campaign to vaccinate some 640,000 children under the age of 10 in the Gaza Strip against polio, days after a 10-month-old baby was paralyzed by the poliovirus type 2.
“Under the current conditions, we are not in a position to achieve our objectives today,” a senior UN official told Reuters. “As of this morning, we are no longer operating in Gaza.”
“Where do we move now?” the official asked, adding that personnel had moved so quickly that equipment had been left behind.
Despite the halt, the UN did not officially stop its aid efforts.
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“We are not going because the people there need us,” the official said. “We are trying to balance the needs of the population with the need for safety and protection of UN personnel.”
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The UN’s main operations centre used to be in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip until Israel expelled over a million Palestinians from the area earlier this year.
Gaza residents have repeatedly stated that there are no so-called security zones in the besieged Strip and that Israel frequently targets areas it has designated as humanitarian zones.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which operates differently from other UN agencies in the Gaza Strip, continued to provide health and other services on Monday but said it faced serious challenges.
More than 200 UNRWA staff were killed by Israeli forces.
“We are being pushed into smaller and smaller areas of Gaza,” Sam Rose, a senior UNRWA field officer, told reporters.
“The humanitarian zone declared by Israel has shrunk. It now covers about 11 percent of the entire Gaza Strip. But that is not 11 percent of the land that is habitable, suitable for services and suitable for living.”
According to UNRWA, only three of 18 wells in Deir al-Balah were functioning, resulting in a water shortage of 85 percent.
Rose said over 3,000 people will work on the polio vaccination campaign, which is scheduled to begin on Saturday. The case of the baby with polio type 2 was the first such case in Gaza in 25 years.
Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday that it had managed to deliver “only half of the 24,000 tonnes of food aid needed for relief efforts to feed 1.1 million people”.
Since the war began on October 7, Israeli forces in Gaza have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
