U.N. General Assembly set to hold emergency meeting
The United Nations General Assembly will meet tomorrow to discuss the situation in Gaza in an emergency meeting, its president said.
This comes after the U.S. on Friday vetoed a Security Council resolution for a cease-fire — one that was backed by almost all other members. The United Kingdom abstained.
The U.S. has come under increasing criticism from humanitarian aid agencies, U.N. officials and many countries for voting against a cease-fire.
‘The clock is really ticking’: Desperation mounts for starving Palestinians
As goods become increasingly scarce and expensive, World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau reiterated calls for a cease-fire and the opening of the Kerem Shalom border crossing to help scale up aid deliveries in Gaza.
“There’s a lot of tension around food. People are so desperate,” Skau told NBC News. “I went to distribution points where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people waiting in queues, and there’s anger and frustration.”
It’s unclear how long order can be sustained when so much of Gaza’s population is starving. Aid trucks that do manage to get through the Rafah crossing aren’t able to meet the need, Skau said. The food crisis comes on top of the operational challenges that are waiting other on the side.
Skau said that during his recent visit to the Palestinian enclave, he spoke to people who hadn’t eaten in days.
“If this further deteriorates, you know, people will have nothing, and you can just imagine the desperation that we will have in our hands then if we’re not even able to deliver what we are delivering at the moment,” he said. “And I think, you know, the clock is really ticking.”
Detained Palestinians are bound and blindfolded in Gaza
This image taken Friday and released by The Associated Press today after being reviewed by the Israeli military censor, shows a truck carrying detained Palestinian men, bound and blindfolded, to an undisclosed location in northern Gaza.
IDF claims Hamas ‘preventing Gazans from accessing humanitarian aid’ by ‘forcefully diverting supplies’
The Israel Defense Forces said Hamas is preventing residents of Gaza from accessing humanitarian aid by forcefully diverting supplies for its own use.
The IDF Border Defense Corps released video footage that it says shows members of Hamas forcefully taking humanitarian aid from civilians, loading it it onto a vehicle and then driving to a Hamas-run site. NBC News was not able to independently verify the contents of the video.
The IDF said that it has continued efforts to enable humanitarian aid to reach civilians in the Gaza Strip, further adding that tens of thousands of tons of aid designated for international humanitarian organizations have entered Gaza.
The United Nations and the World Health Organization maintain that a major humanitarian crisis is unfolding and that the amount of aid entering Gaza is nowhere near sufficient.