Aid has also been severed to the Gaza Strip, although this emergency isn’t related to the U.S. aid cuts. Rather, it comes alongside a renewed Israeli bombardment that killed 400 people this week and broke a tentative two-month ceasefire.
During that ceasefire, aid surged into the territory, and while aid workers on the ground say it still wasn’t enough, the recent attacks have put an end to even that. Now, employees of Mercy Corps tell my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz that there are “no aid operations in the field.”
“There are no safe areas,” one Mercy Corps aid worker says.
To underscore that point, yesterday, a U.N. staff member was killed and five others injured during a strike on accommodations for the Gaza operation of the United Nations Office for Project Services, or UNOPS. “These premises were well known by the Israel Defense Forces and they were deconflicted,” says Jorge Moreira da Silva, the agency’s executive director.
With the ceasefire in tatters, aid workers tell Jesse they feel like they’re back to square one.
Read: Gaza aid workers say there are ‘no aid operations in the field’