UN says it still faces obstacles in bid to fend off famine in Gaza

The United Nations is still struggling to prevent famine in the Gaza Strip and while there has been some improvement in coordination with Israel, aid deliveries in the enclave still face difficulties, a senior UN aid official says.

Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, says aid deliveries within Gaza are facing significant checkpoint delays and that last week 41% of UN requests to deliver aid to northern Gaza were denied.

“We’re dealing with this dance where we do one step forward, two steps backward, or two steps forward, one step backward, which leaves us basically always at the same point,” De Domenico tells reporters.

“For every new opportunity that we’ve been given, we will find yet another challenge to deal with,” he says. “So it’s really, really difficult for us to scale up to where we would like to be.”

US officials have noted steady progress in the amount of aid that goes into Gaza, the US State Department said on Tuesday, but it is still not at the desired level and Washington is working to improve that.