UNITED NATIONS: United Nations aid operations in the Gaza Strip continued on Tuesday, a day after a senior UN official said humanitarian efforts had ground to a halt because new Israeli evacuation orders forced the shutdown of the main UN operations center.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday appeared to temper the remarks by the UN official, who spoke on Monday on condition of anonymity. When asked if conditions in Gaza had caused a halt to UN aid deliveries on Monday, Dujarric told reporters: “The conditions in Gaza yesterday made it extremely, extremely difficult for us to do our work.”
“We are doing what we can with what we have,” he said. “We’ve been saying from the beginning — this is aid delivery by seizing every opportunity, seizing every crack that we can fill. So every situation is assessed day by day, hour by hour.”
UN safety and security chief Gilles Michaud said on Tuesday that over the weekend the Israeli military only gave a few hours notice for more than 200 UN personnel to move out of offices and living spaces in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza.
He said the “the timing could hardly be worse” with a massive polio vaccination campaign due to start shortly that required large numbers of UN staff to enter Gaza.
“The United Nations is determined to stay in Gaza,” he said in a statement. “Humanitarian aid delivery continues – a tremendous feat given that we are operating at the upper-most peripheries of tolerable risk.”
The International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that the new evacuation orders by Israel had forced it and other humanitarian groups to “halt aid operations, during what is already a dire situation for civilians.”
“It’s urgent that humanitarian actors can continue their work, without threat from displacement or military operations. We urge all parties to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access at all times,” the organization posted on X.
The current war in the Palestinian enclave began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen stormed into Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, Israel’s military has leveled swathes of the Palestinian enclave, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million people from their homes, giving rise to deadly hunger and disease and killing at least 40,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that Gaza’s population was increasingly being told by Israel “to concentrate within the Israeli-designated zone in Al Mawasi, which spans to only about 41 square kilometers or roughly 11 percent of Gaza’s total area.”
It said overcrowding, with a density of 30,000 to 34,000 individuals per square kilometer (77,000 to 87,000 per square mile), had exacerbated a dire shortage of essential resources such as water, sanitation and hygiene supplies, health services, protection and shelter.
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UN ‘doing what it can’ to deliver Gaza aid as evacuation orders cause extreme difficulties
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UN ‘doing what it can’ to deliver Gaza aid as evacuation orders cause extreme difficulties
- UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric: ‘We’ve been saying from the beginning — this is aid delivery by seizing every opportunity, seizing every crack that we can fill’
- International Rescue Committee: ‘It’s urgent that humanitarian actors can continue their work, without threat from displacement or military operations’
Hamas official says group in final stage of choosing new chief
CAIRO: A senior Hamas official told AFP on Sunday that the Palestinian movement was in the final phase of selecting a new leader, with two prominent figures competing for the position.
Hamas recently completed the formation of a new Shoura Council, a consultative body largely composed of religious scholars, as well as a new political bureau.
Members of the council are elected every four years by representatives from Hamas’s three branches: the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and the movement’s external leadership.
Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails are also eligible to vote.
The council subsequently elects the political bureau, which in turn selects the head of the movement.
“The movement has completed its internal elections in the three regions and has reached the final stage of selecting the head of the political bureau,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly.
He added that the race for the group’s leadership is now between Khaled Meshaal and Khalil Al-Hayya.
A second Hamas source confirmed the development within the organization, which fought a devastating war with Israel following its October 7, 2023 attack.
Hayya, 65, a Gaza native and Hamas’s chief negotiator in ceasefire talks, has held senior roles since at least 2006, according to the US-based NGO the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).
Meshaal, who led the political bureau from 2004 to 2017, has never lived in Gaza. He was born in the West Bank in 1956.
He joined Hamas in Kuwait and later lived in Jordan, Syria and Qatar. The CEP says he oversaw Hamas’s evolution into a political-military hybrid.
He currently heads the movement’s diaspora office.
Last month, a Hamas source told AFP that Hayya enjoys backing from the group’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassem Brigades.
After Israel killed former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024, the group chose its then-Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar as his successor.
Israel accused Sinwar of masterminding the October 7 attack.
He too was killed by Israeli forces in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, three months after Haniyeh’s assassination.
Hamas then opted for an interim five-member leadership committee based in Qatar, postponing the appointment of a single leader until elections, given the risk of the new chief being targeted by Israel.
Hamas recently completed the formation of a new Shoura Council, a consultative body largely composed of religious scholars, as well as a new political bureau.
Members of the council are elected every four years by representatives from Hamas’s three branches: the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and the movement’s external leadership.
Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails are also eligible to vote.
The council subsequently elects the political bureau, which in turn selects the head of the movement.
“The movement has completed its internal elections in the three regions and has reached the final stage of selecting the head of the political bureau,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly.
He added that the race for the group’s leadership is now between Khaled Meshaal and Khalil Al-Hayya.
A second Hamas source confirmed the development within the organization, which fought a devastating war with Israel following its October 7, 2023 attack.
Hayya, 65, a Gaza native and Hamas’s chief negotiator in ceasefire talks, has held senior roles since at least 2006, according to the US-based NGO the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).
Meshaal, who led the political bureau from 2004 to 2017, has never lived in Gaza. He was born in the West Bank in 1956.
He joined Hamas in Kuwait and later lived in Jordan, Syria and Qatar. The CEP says he oversaw Hamas’s evolution into a political-military hybrid.
He currently heads the movement’s diaspora office.
Last month, a Hamas source told AFP that Hayya enjoys backing from the group’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassem Brigades.
After Israel killed former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024, the group chose its then-Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar as his successor.
Israel accused Sinwar of masterminding the October 7 attack.
He too was killed by Israeli forces in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, three months after Haniyeh’s assassination.
Hamas then opted for an interim five-member leadership committee based in Qatar, postponing the appointment of a single leader until elections, given the risk of the new chief being targeted by Israel.
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