UN Secretary-General António Guterres reiterated his call Saturday for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, using a visit to a border crossing in Egypt to slam the “nonstop nightmare” Palestinians faced in the territory.
“I want Palestinians in Gaza to know: You are not alone,” Guterres said. “People around the world are outraged about the horrors we are all witnessing in real-time. I carry the voices of the vast majority of the world: We have seen enough. We have heard enough.”
Guterres spoke to reporters from the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, one of the two main ground corridors being used to transport desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. More than five months into Israel’s war, Palestinians in Gaza are facing widespread hunger and deprivation despite a huge international relief effort.
For months, aid organizations have struggled to transport and distribute sufficient food and other supplies in Gaza, which faces a blockade jointly enforced by Egypt and Israel.
U.N. officials have said the obstacles include lengthy security inspections, attacks on aid convoys by desperate Palestinians and organized gangs, and roads badly damaged by months of airstrikes and fighting.
The worsening conditions this past week led the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global authority that has classified food security crises for decades, to project that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza. Aid groups and U.N. officials have argued that it would be better for Israel to ease entry restrictions for trucks at established crossing points into the enclave and to do more to speed the delivery of goods inside Gaza.
“From this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all: a long line of blocked red relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other,” Guterres said. “That is more than tragic — it is a moral outrage.”
The visit to the border by Guterres came a day after a draft U.N. Security Council resolution, backed by the United States and calling for an “immediate and sustained cease-fire in Gaza,” failed to pass when Russia, China, and Algeria voted against it at a meeting of the council in New York.
The resolution, which included some of Washington’s strongest language since the start of the war, was criticized by those who opposed it and others for not demanding a permanent end to the war. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, denounced the U.S.-backed measure before the vote, calling it a “hypocritical initiative” that did not do enough “to save the lives of Palestinians.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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