GENEVA: The United Nations took aim Tuesday at Israel’s months-long block on bringing tents into the Gaza Strip, despite continual displacement orders being issued to civilians in the devastated territory.
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, said shelter items had been banned from entering Gaza for about five months — a period in which more than 700,000 people had been displaced or re-displaced.
“They may have been provided with a tent, and then they are displaced again and they have no possibility of taking the tent with them,” he told a press briefing in Geneva.
He said Israel had classified tents as “dual use” because they considered tent poles could potentially be used for a military purpose.
He decried “layers of bureaucracy which seem designed not to facilitate fast entry of anything but rather the opposite.”
Israel announced earlier this month that it intended to take over Gaza City and issued another displacement order to residents on Saturday.
Laerke said tents were still not being allowed into the territory.
The UN human rights office meanwhile said the Gaza City takeover plans bore “huge risks for civilians.”
“There are risks of mass displacement and more and more killings and more misery,” said spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan.
He accused Israel of displacing Palestinians to areas where strikes were continuing.
Kheetan said “hundreds of thousands” were being told to go south to Al-Mawasi, which he said was still under bombardment.
He said Palestinians in Al-Mawasi had “little or no access to essential services and supplies, including food, water, electricity and tents.”
Across the Gaza Strip, Kheetan said the risk of starvation was “everywhere.”
“This is a direct result of the Israeli government’s policy of blocking humanitarian aid. In the past few weeks, Israeli authorities have only allowed aid to enter in quantities that remain far below what would be required to avert widespread starvation,” he said.
The Israel- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private organization, began distributing food in the Gaza Strip in late May as Israel began easing a more than two-month aid blockade on the Palestinian territory that had exacerbated existing shortages.
“Reaching the meagre supplies available can be a deadly pursuit,” said Kheetan.
“Since May 27 and up until August 17, we have documented that 1,857 Palestinians were killed while seeking food, including 1,021 killed in the vicinity of the GHF sites, and 836 killed on the routes of supply trucks.
“Most of these killings appear to have been committed by the Israeli military.”
More than two million people live in the Gaza Strip.
GHF says it has distributed more than 2.1 million boxes of foodstuffs to date.
“GHF has demonstrated that aid can be delivered safely and at scale,” its executive director John Acree said Monday.
