Oxfam says Israel has been deliberately blocking entry of humanitarian aid and life-saving supplies into the besieged Gaza Strip.
Chris McIntosh, spokesman for the global charity, said in remarks on Friday that obstacles facing aid organizations include bombings and drone attacks by Israeli forces who were now pushing ahead with the occupation of Gaza City.
But there is also the challenge of “a deliberate delay by Israel in allowing us to bring in aid”, he said.
“Israel is preventing us from bringing in generators, citing security concerns. Israel is using blocking tactics as a weapon to frustrate us in providing relief to the people of Gaza,” McIntosh added.
More than 100 organizations said the Israeli authorities had rejected requests from "dozens" of NGOs for life-saving aid to enter the blockaded Palestinian territory.
A statement signed by NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and Save the Children, said Israel had denied the requests because the organizations were "not authorized to deliver aid", despite many of them having worked in Gaza for decades.
Consequently, millions of dollars' worth of food, medicine, water and shelter equipment are currently languishing in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt, the NGOs said.
Separately, a report released on Friday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said nearly 13,000 children in the Gaza Strip were hospitalized in July due to severe malnutrition.
It said among them, 2,800 children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
The report said that in July, the World Food Programme (WFP) arranged 1,012 truckloads carrying a total of 13,000 tons of food through Gaza's border crossings. However, only 10 of these trucks reached the designated warehouses inside the Gaza Strip
Gaza’s Interior Ministry recently said Israel was deliberately fueling chaos and “engineering starvation” by preventing aid from reaching those in need.
The ministry urged the international community to pressure Israel to allow agencies, especially the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), to safely deliver aid across Gaza.
At least one more Palestinian child starved to death in Gaza over the past day, raising the total number of hunger-related deaths to 240, including 107 children, Gaza Health Ministry said on Friday.
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