International community should focus on entry of aid to Gaza by land: UN

By Merve Aydogan

TORONTO, Canada (AA) - The UN welcomed US plans Thursday to establish a port in the Gaza Strip to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinian enclave, but said the focus should continue to be on aid via land.

"Any way to get more aid into Gaza, whether by sea or airdrop is obviously good. Our focus and the international community's focus should continue to be on increasing the large-scale distribution and entry of aid by land," Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told reporters.

Emphasizing that the aid via land is "cost-effective" and "volume effective," Dujarric said: "That's why we've been saying from the beginning, we need more entry points, and we need a larger volume of aid to come in by land."

"According to OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), half of the 224 aid missions planned to areas requiring coordination were facilitated by the Israeli authorities," he said. "Following Israeli naval fire that hit a UN-coordinated food convoy heading to north Gaza on Feb. 5, there was an operational pause. As a result, only 24 missions were planned to the besieged north last month, of them just six were facilitated.”

Israel has launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza since a cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7. The offensive has killed at least 30,800 victims and injured nearly 73,000 others amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on the Palestinian enclave, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, on the verge of starvation.

About 85% of Gazans have been displaced by the Israeli onslaught amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which in an interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.