UN chief says aid to Gaza requires Israel to “remove obstacles”

The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7

Cairo:

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in Cairo on Sunday that delivering necessary aid to famine-threatened Gaza “requires Israel to remove remaining obstacles and chokepoints” to relief.

At a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Shoukry, Guterres reiterated his call for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” to alleviate “the plight of Palestinian children, women and men struggling with the nightmare in Gaza.”

On Saturday, he visited the Rafah crossing with Gaza, where nearly six months of war and siege have displaced the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people and destroyed civilian infrastructure.

“Looking across Gaza, the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are virtually in full swing,” the UN secretary-general said.

“The world recognizes that it is time to silence the guns and ensure an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” he continued.

The Israeli government faces growing international pressure to ease its bombing and ground offensive in Gaza, which the region’s health ministry says has killed at least 32,226 people, mostly women and children.

The war was sparked when Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

Israel has vowed to launch retaliatory military operations against Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge near the Egyptian border.

Guterres also met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who called the Rafah crossing and Egypt’s El-Arish airport “vital arteries for the delivery of life-saving aid to Gaza.”

“But these arteries are clogged,” he said, referring to a massive pile-up of trucks on the Egyptian side that would only trickle in as the humanitarian situation worsened.

Calls are growing for Israel to ease aid restrictions and open more crossings into Gaza.

“Palestinians in Gaza urgently need the aid that was promised – massive amounts of it. Not a trickle, not a decline,” Guterres said.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned of famine in the Palestinian territories, especially in the north, and aid deliveries have been largely cut off.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)