MULTIPLE aid organisations, including the UN in recent hours, have said that they will be pausing operations in Gaza after an attack on a charity convoy killed seven aid workers.
This includes the World Central Kitchen, which had 68 kitchens across the enclave, along with the American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) and Project Hope, which provides healthcare aid.
These announcements have sparked increasing concern about the disruption of aid in Gaza, which is on the brink of a famine.
This is coming after the World Central Kitchen founder Jose Andres accused Israeli forces in Gaza of targeting the aid workers in a strike that killed seven members of his staff on Monday, “systematically, car by car”.
Speaking to Reuters news agency, Andres says that the killing of seven WCK personnel was not a mistake or a misfire, and asserts that the Israelis knew their movements at the time of the attack.
“Even if we were not in coordination with the (Israeli army), no democratic country and no military can be targeting civilians and humanitarians,” he says.
Half the population – about 1.1m people – are starving, according to the IPC classification. Before April, the UN’s worst-case scenario estimated that the entire population will be in famine by July 2024.
Gaza has the “highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country,” the UN has said.
Its most senior human rights official, Volker Türk, told the BBC that Israel bore significant blame for the crisis in Gaza, and there was a “plausible” case that it was using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israel has vehemently denied this.
