UN 'doing what it can' to deliver Gaza aid as evacuation orders cause extreme difficulties

United Nations aid operations in the Gaza Strip continued on Tuesday, 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 on Monday, Dujarric told reporters: "The conditions in Gaza yesterday 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."

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 Al-Balah in central Gaza.

He said the "the timing could hardly be worse" with a massive polio vaccination campaign due to start shortly that required 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."

The International Rescue Committee said on Tuesday that the new evacuation orders by Israel had forced it 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.

The current war in the Palestinian enclave began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen stormed into Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israel's military has levelled swathes 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.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that Gaza's population was increasingly being told by Israel "to concentrate within the Israeli-designated zone in Al Mawasi, which spans to only about 41 square kilometres or roughly 11% of Gaza's total area."

It said overcrowding, with a density of 30,000 to 34,000 individuals per square kilometre (77,000 to 87,000 per square mile), had exacerbated a dire shortage of essential resources such as water, sanitation and hygiene supplies, health services, protection and shelter.