The UN has been forced to evacuate its aid centre for the second time since the war began, an official said.
United Nations aid operations in the besieged Gaza Strip are continuing a day after a senior U.N. official said humanitarian efforts had ground to a halt because new Israeli evacuation orders forced the closure of the U.N.’s main operations center.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric appeared to temper the comments of the UN official, who spoke on Monday on condition of anonymity.
Asked whether conditions in Gaza had led to a halt in UN humanitarian aid deliveries, Dujarric told reporters: “The conditions in Gaza yesterday (Monday) made our work extremely difficult.”
“We are doing what we can with the means we have,” he said. “We have said this from the beginning: it is about providing assistance by seizing every opportunity, by seizing every gap that we can fill. So each situation is assessed day by day, hour by hour.”
The UN has had to evacuate its humanitarian aid centre in the Gaza Strip for the second time since the start of the war on orders from the Israeli army, an official said.
The centre, with warehouses and staff housing, had previously been moved due to the Israeli ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza in early May.
The new center – with housing, offices and storage facilities for humanitarian goods – was set up in Deir el-Balah, in the central part of the enclave, but an evacuation order issued on Sunday also included the new headquarters.
A spokesman for the UN humanitarian emergency agency OCHA said in Geneva that since Friday, evacuation orders have been issued for 19 neighbourhoods in the northern Gaza Strip and Deir el-Balah, with 15 premises where UN and NGO staff and their families were living affected.
Four UN relief warehouses, a water reservoir, a desalination plant, three wells, two small health centres and a hospital were also affected. Twenty-nine emergency shelters for displaced people were located in these areas.
UN security chief Gilles Michaud said on Tuesday that over the weekend the Israeli military gave more than 200 UN staff members only a few hours’ notice to leave offices and residential premises in Deir el-Balah.
“The timing could hardly be worse,” he said, as a massive polio vaccination campaign is due to begin soon, requiring large numbers of UN staff to enter Gaza.
“The United Nations is determined to remain in Gaza,” he said in a statement. “Humanitarian assistance continues to flow – a considerable feat given that we operate at the most exposed extremities.
“The mass evacuation orders are the latest in a long list of unbearable threats to UN and humanitarian personnel.”
The International Rescue Committee said Tuesday that Israel’s new evacuation orders had forced the charity and other aid groups to “suspend their aid operations in an already dire situation for civilians.”
“It is urgent that humanitarian actors can continue their work, without being threatened by population displacement or military operations. We urge all parties to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access at all times,” the organization said on X.
On October 7 last year, Hamas fighters stormed Israeli communities, killing around 1,100 people and abducting around 250 captives, according to Israeli counts.
Since then, the Israeli military has razed swathes of the Palestinian enclave, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million residents from their homes, causing hunger and deadly disease and killing at least 40,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials.