UN says 560 tonnes of food entering Gaza daily since ceasefire but more needed

GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. World Food Program said on Friday it had brought an average of 560 tonnes of food into Gaza a day since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire came into effect, but that this still remained below the scale of needs in the region.

With famine conditions present in parts of Gaza, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said on Wednesday that thousands of aid vehicles will now need to enter Gaza every week to ease the crisis.

“We are still below what we need, but we are getting there… The ceasefire has opened a narrow window of opportunity and WFP is moving very quickly and quickly to increase food aid,” WFP spokesman Abeer Etefa told reporters in Geneva.

WFP stated that it did not start distribution in Gaza City and stated that the two border gates with Israel, Zikim and Erez, in the north of the region where the humanitarian crisis is most severe, are constantly closed.

“Access to Gaza City and the north of Gaza is extremely difficult,” Etefa said, adding that convoys of wheat flour and ready-to-eat food parcels had difficulty moving through damaged or blocked roads from the south of the war-torn area.

Although small amounts of food products had reached the north, aid convoys were still unable to transport significant amounts of food there and to other regions.

“We had 57 trucks (to South and Central Gaza) yesterday. We see this as a breakthrough, but we are not around 80-100 trucks a day yet,” Etefa said. he said.

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin, editing by Kirsti Knolle and Mark Heinrich)