UN has been forced to evacuate its humanitarian aid hub a second time since the start of the war, official says.
United Nations aid operations in the besieged Gaza Strip continue 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 centre.
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, Dujarric told reporters: “The conditions in Gaza yesterday [Monday] 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.”
The UN has had to evacuate its humanitarian aid hub in the Gaza Strip for a second time since the start of the war on the orders of the Israeli military, according to an official.
The hub, with warehouses and accommodation for staff, had already been relocated before due to the Israeli ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza at the start of May.
The new hub – with accommodation, offices and storage rooms for humanitarian – goods was set up in Deir el-Balah in the central part of the enclave, but an evacuation order on Sunday also included the new headquarters.
A spokesperson for the UN emergency aid organisation OCHA said in Geneva that since Friday, evacuation orders have been issued for 19 neighbourhoods in the northern Gaza Strip and Deir el-Balah, with 15 premises in which UN and NGO staff and their families lived affected.
Four UN warehouses for relief supplies, a water reservoir, a desalination plant, three wells, two smaller health facilities and a hospital were also affected. There were 29 emergency shelters for displaced people in those areas.
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 el-Balah.
He said “the timing could hardly be worse”, with a huge polio vaccination campaign due to start shortly which requires 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.
“Mass evacuation orders are the latest in a long list of unbearable threats to UN and humanitarian personnel.”
The International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that Israel’s new evacuation orders had forced the charity 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 organisation posted on X.
On October 7 last year, Hamas fighters stormed Israeli communities, killing about 1,100 people and abducting about 250 captives, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, Israel’s military has levelled swaths 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.
