A senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) official has accused the United Nations and other international organizations of failing to live up to their commitments to deliver humanitarian assistance as Israel comes under mounting scrutiny over the deteriorating conditions in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
Speaking to reporters on a press call Tuesday, Colonel Moshe Tetro, head of the IDF’s Coordination and Liaison Administration for Gaza, asserted that “there are goods of more than 450 trucks” on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and Gaza, and they are “waiting for the international community organizations to take the goods to be distributed inside Gaza.”
“We are ready and willing to facilitate the entrance of tens, if not hundreds, of trucks every day, but the Palestinian side of Kerem Shalom is fully loaded,” Tetro said. “Unfortunately, today and yesterday, the U.N. didn’t show up to work.”
He argued that “the bottleneck is not the Israeli side,” and that, “if there will be efficient work by the international community that are working inside Gaza, I think the distribution will be much better.”
Reached for comment, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) spokesperson Eri Kaneko told Newsweek that “the UN and our humanitarian partners have not been able to regularly pick up supplies from the crossing points due to safety concerns and a breakdown of law and order.”
“Despite this, our colleagues have been taking significant risks to sustain the delivery of humanitarian supplies essential to the survival of civilians,” Kaneko said. “We continue to engage to resolve these issues. The IDF has a responsibility to facilitate humanitarian operations within Gaza. Aid piling up at the crossing is evidence of an absence of this enabling environment amidst enormous needs.”
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The comments came one day after the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) warned in a report that “the…
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