Sputnik This Saturday (23), the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, went to the city of Rafah on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, and said that dozens of trucks parked at the entrance to the Strip without being able to enter “is more than tragic.”
The UN Secretary-General said it was time for Israel to make a “firm commitment” to unrestricted access for humanitarian goods throughout Gaza.
“Here, at this crossing, we see the sadness and cruelty of it all. A long line of aid trucks blocked on one side of the gates, and the long shadow of hunger on the other. This is more than tragic. It is a morality. Anger.” Guterres said.
Before his stop at the border, Guterres landed in the city of Al-Arish, in North Sinai, Egypt, where much international aid to Gaza is delivered and stored.
North Sinai Governor, Muhammad Shusha, said while receiving the aid that about seven thousand trucks were waiting in North Sinai to deliver aid to Gaza, but the inspection procedures required by Israel delayed the flow of aid.
Tel Aviv, which pledged to destroy Hamas, kept all its land crossings to the Strip closed except for one. It opened the Kerem Shalom crossing near Rafah in late December, and denies accusations from Egypt and United Nations relief agencies that it delayed the delivery of humanitarian aid.
But humanitarian workers say only about a fifth of the needed supplies have entered the enclave, and the only way to meet the needs is to quickly increase deliveries by land.
In comments he later made to reporters, Guterres also reinforced international calls against the ground operation in the city of Rafah.
“Any successful program to provide safety and security to the residents of Rafah when this security does not exist throughout the territory of Gaza is highly questionable,” he said.
In Gaza, fighting broke out on Saturday (23) around the main hospital in the Strip, with Israel claiming to have killed more than 170 militants in a large-scale operation, which, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, also resulted in the deaths of five patients. .
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 32,000 people, many of them women and children, according to local health authorities. Israel launched the attack in response to a Hamas attack that killed about 1,350 people and took more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli data.
