The humanitarian situation is deteriorating in the Gaza Strip, where Israel continues to block aid in defiance of international calls, with a senior United Nations official now saying that Gaza is “the hungriest place” on the planet.

“Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth,” Jens Laerke, the spokesperson of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

He added the Gaza Strip is the only territory in the world, where the entire population is at risk of famine as Israel continues to constraint aid entry into the region.  

“The aid operation that we have ready to roll is being put in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations, not only in the world today, but in recent history,” Laerke said, according to U.N. News.

He said that Israel permitted the entry of approximately 900 aid trucks into Gaza ten days ago, but less than 600 have so far been offloaded.

The limited number of truckloads allowed into Gaza is “drip-feeding food into an area on the verge of catastrophic hunger,” the U.N. official said.

The Israeli regime imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza on March 2 to pressure Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal on Tel Aviv’s conditions. Amid international outcry, Israel and the United States have also pushed for an aid plan to replace the existing UN-backed programs. Their plan has drawn strong criticism from the U.N. and international aid organizations, which say the scheme serves Israel’s war objectives.

On Friday, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, urged the international community to “stop the clock” on continued and deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid into Gaza by the Israeli regime.

“We continue to witness a brutal humanitarian camouflage, where the red lines have led to massive atrocities. Israel pretends to promote humanitarian solutions in order to continue its control of Gaza and sustain its systematic denial of life-saving humanitarian aid to the starving population in the besieged strip,” she said, according to a news release by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

She added that what Israel is doing is a deliberate strategy aimed at masking atrocities and diverting international attention from legal accountability.

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