4 hours ago
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Men carry bags of flour taken by an aid truck near an Israeli checkpoint in Gaza City last month
The World Food Program (WFP) says its first attempt in two weeks to bring food aid to the northern Gaza Strip has been blocked by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
According to the UN agency, the convoy of 14 trucks was “turned back” at a checkpoint and later looted by crowds of “desperate people.”
The BBC has contacted the IDF for comment.
It comes a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) said children were starving in northern Gaza.
In a statement, the WFP said efforts to “deliver urgently needed food to the area” resumed on Tuesday “but were largely unsuccessful.”
The agency said the convoy was turned back by the IDF after a three-hour wait at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint.
The trucks were then diverted and “later stopped by a large crowd of desperate people who looted the food and took about 200 tons from the trucks,” the WFP said.
The BBC reached out to the IDF for comment, which directed all questions to Cogat, the Israeli Defense Ministry body tasked with coordinating access to aid in Gaza.
It was the WFP's first attempt in two weeks to deliver aid to the northern Gaza Strip.
On February 20, the agency said it was suspending food deliveries to the region because its recent convoys had experienced “complete chaos and violence due to the breakdown of civil order,” including violent looting.
Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed when crowds converged on an aid convoy operated by private contractors and escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.
Palestinian health authorities said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. According to the Israeli military, most of them died because they were trampled or run over by the aid trucks. It said soldiers near the convoy fired at people who approached them and saw them as a threat.
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Watch: Devastation after dozens die during aid deliveries in Gaza
Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director, told Turkey's Anadolu news agency that the risk of such an incident was one of the reasons aid deliveries were put on hold two weeks ago.
“We were criticized by everyone for pausing. But we did that because we were afraid of what happened two days ago; we are looking for ways to come back,” he said.
Meanwhile, the US says it airdropped 36,000 meals into the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday in coordination with Jordan – the second such joint mission in recent days.
The UN has warned that famine in Gaza is “almost inevitable” without action, and the WHO says children are starving in northern Gaza.
A food shortage led to the deaths of 10 children and “severe malnutrition” while hospital buildings were destroyed, the agency's chief said on Monday.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died of malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
A sixteenth child died in a hospital in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Monday.
A senior U.N. aid official warned last week that at least 576,000 people across Gaza – a quarter of the population – face catastrophic food insecurity and one in six children under two in the north suffer from acute malnutrition.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said there were “no excuses” for Israel not to allow further aid into the territory.
IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on Sunday that they were allowing aid convoys and airdrops into the northern Gaza Strip “because we want humanitarian aid to reach civilians in need in the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli military launched a large-scale air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas – which is banned as a terrorist organization by Israel, Britain, the United States and others – after the group's gunmen killed about 1,200 people and 253 people in southern Israel on October 7 captured and brought back to Gaza as hostages.
More than 30,600 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory's health ministry.