To support the immediate scale-up of humanitarian operations, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher on Monday allocated an additional 11 million U.S. dollars in aid funds to the Gaza Strip.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), headed by Fletcher, said the amount was in addition to the 9 million dollars designated last week from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) for Gaza.
However, Fletcher warned that without fresh contributions to the CERF, critical aid cannot keep flowing to people who rely on it.
OCHA said that under the humanitarian plan for the initial 60 days of the ceasefire, the United Nations and its partners will deliver life-saving assistance and services to people across the strip, wherever they need support.
The aid will include food, water, health services, shelter supplies, hygiene items, protection support and other critical help, it said.
The office said that the UN 2720 Mechanism for Gaza reported Israel’s approval of additional aid, bringing the cleared pipeline to 190,000 tonnes as of Sunday. “These supplies are across the region — in Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and the West Bank — and are ready to move.”
The UN 2720 Mechanism enables humanitarian partners to register on an integrated application portal and database where all planned aid consignments intended for Gaza are tracked.
For the first time since March, OCHA reported that cooking gas entered the strip on Sunday, and more tents for displaced families, frozen meat, fresh fruit, flour and medicines also crossed into Gaza throughout the day.
The office said that humanitarians can move more easily in many areas inside Gaza, and teams are reaching people in places that had been cut off for up to several months because of violence.
From Friday to Sunday, partners monitoring displacements recorded almost 310,000 people moving from southern to northern Gaza and about 23,000 movements in other directions, said OCHA. – Xinhua
