Aid group says it was turned away by Israeli military as desperation intensifies

The Israeli military turned back a convoy trying to take 200 tons of food into the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, a U.N. agency said, a day after United Nations officials said children in the territory were dying of starvation.

The World Food Program was attempting its first food delivery into northern Gaza since it said on Feb. 20 that it had to suspend operations in the region because of Israeli restrictions and a breakdown of civil order among hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine. A convoy of 14 trucks waited for three hours at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint in central Gaza before it was turned away by the Israeli military and was later stopped by a “large crowd of desperate people who looted the food,” the WFP said in a statement.

The organization’s deliveries to the north had already been largely halted for three weeks before the Feb. 20 announcement over safety concerns and what it called the absence of a functional system for coordinating with the Israeli military, which has maintained tight control over aid to Gaza.

At least 15 children in northern Gaza have died in recent days from malnutrition and dehydration, according to the territory’s health ministry.

On Monday, as part of a relief effort involving Palestinian businesspeople, 15 trucks were dispatched to northern Gaza, but at least five were looted along the way, according to an Israeli official who was not authorized to comment publicly.

United Nations officials have called for the system for delivering aid to be overhauled, after saying for weeks that Israel was continuing to impose excessive delays at checkpoints, interfering with aid missions and outright denying access to northern Gaza as the humanitarian crisis there spiraled. On Tuesday, a group of U.N.-appointed experts called on Israel to “end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians,” and said it was concerned about “an entire civilian population suffering such unprecedented starvation, so quickly and completely.”

The Israeli military directed a request for comment on Tuesday’s convoy to COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries into Gaza, which did not immediately respond. The agency has previously denied that it was obstructing aid to Gaza, and Israeli officials have accused Hamas of seizing some supplies.

The World Health Organization said at least 10 of the deaths from malnutrition or dehydration happened at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, which its teams were able to visit for the first time since early October over the weekend.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the leader of the WHO’s sub-office in Gaza, Dr. Ahmed Dahir, said the team saw at least two other malnourished children at Kamal Adwan and that other patients and health care workers themselves were “barely surviving on one meal a day.”

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