GENEVA, August 22. /TASS/. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must stop military operations in the Gaza Strip and allow humanitarian organizations to resume delivering food and aid in sufficient quantities, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said at a briefing in Geneva.

According to him, the famine in the Gaza Strip "could have been prevented" if humanitarian organizations had been able to deliver aid to the Palestinian enclave in sufficient quantities. "My ask, my plea, my demand to Prime Minister Netanyahu and anyone who can reach him: enough. Ceasefire. Open the crossings, north and south, all of them. Let us get food and other supplies in unimpeded and at the massive scale required," the senior UN official urged.

"It is a famine within a few hundred meters of food in a fertile land," Fletcher emphasized.

Earlier, the Gaza Strip’s press service reported that only about 2,000 trucks carrying humanitarian aid had entered the enclave over the past three and a half weeks. This is less than 15% of the supplies needed by the local population. According to the press service, at least 15,000 vehicles carrying humanitarian supplies were expected to arrive in Gaza over the past 25 days, but only 2,187 trucks were allowed into the enclave.

Tensions flared up again in the Middle East on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants staged a surprise attack on Israeli territory from Gaza, killing residents of Israeli border settlements and taking over 250 hostages, including women, children and the elderly. Hamas described its attack as retaliation for the aggressive actions taken by Israeli authorities against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. In response, Israel declared a total blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million Palestinians before the crisis, launching air strikes on Gaza as well as some parts of Lebanon and Syria before starting a ground operation in the Palestinian enclave. According to the latest data from the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave as a result of the fighting, over 157,000 have been injured, and an additional 270 Gazans, including 112 children, have died of starvation.