Nine-year-old malnourished Palestinian girl Mariam Dawwas sits on the floor with her mother in the Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza City on August 2, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
New York: Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, has asserted that the famine now devastating Gaza is the result of deliberate Israeli efforts to replace the United Nations aid system with another politically motivated mechanism.
Posting on the X platform, Lazzarini stressed that the situation has gone downhill further by preventing UNRWA from bringing in any assistance to Gaza for five months.
Sidelining and weakening UNRWA has nothing to do with claims of aid diversion to armed groups. It is a deliberate measure to collectively pressure and punish Palestinians for living in Gaza, he added.
In a statement on Friday, UNRWA emphasized that it had 6,000 trucks laden with aid pallets stuck outside Gaza, waiting for approval to enter. It stressed the importance of getting the aid via land instead of airdropping.
