Members of the United Nations Security Council met Wednesday to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and every member called on Israel in speeches to consistently allow aid into northern Gaza and dramatically scale up assistance to the rest of the enclave.
The Security Council has rarely spoken in unity when it comes to the war in Gaza, and differences remain on how to reach and impose a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. But at an emergency meeting on Wednesday, diplomats agreed that the lack of sufficient aid into Gaza needed to be addressed urgently.
Many also denounced Israel’s strike of a hospital complex on Monday that ignited fires that spread to a tent shelter for displaced people next to a hospital, leading to accounts that people were burned alive.
Some of the sharpest criticism came from Israel’s allies, including the United States, which vetoed three resolutions blocking efforts for a cease-fire in the first eight months of the war and abstained from one that eventually passed in June.
“There are no words, simply no words, to describe what we saw,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations. “Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields. We have made this clear to Israel.”
Ms. Thomas-Greenfield also said that a “policy of starvation” in northern Gaza would be “horrific and unacceptable and would have implications under international law and U.S. law.”
The rebuke came as the United States warned Israel on Sunday in a letter that if it did not provide scaled up humanitarian aid to Gaza in the next 30 days, it would face repercussions that could include a halt to American military aid to Israel.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, accused Israel of trying to force Palestinians out of Gaza by withholding food aid, saying, “This is not war; these are crimes,” Mr. Mansour said, adding, “This is genocide. They must be stopped, and they must be stopped now.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, defended Israel’s actions and blamed Hamas for using Palestinian civilians as human shields and for robbing aid trucks.
“The only way to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza is to defeat Hamas and completely disarm it,” Mr. Danon said. He claimed Hamas “steals, stores and sells the aid that enters the Gaza Strip and uses it to feed its terrorist machine and not to feed the Gazans.”
Scott Peterson, the Gaza director of UNRWA, the main U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, said on Wednesday that Israel had allowed 12 aid trucks into northern Gaza on Sept. 30, but no other trucks were allowed into that region of the enclave after that.
COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, insisted that it was not limiting aid to Gaza and has blamed humanitarian agencies for failing to distribute the supplies it has admitted into the enclave after screening. On Wednesday, it said that it had inspected and permitted 50 aid trucks to enter northern Gaza from Jordan — carrying food, water, medical and other supplies — “in accordance with international law.”
To adequately service civilians, the U.N. said it needed about 40 to 50 trucks per day in northern Gaza and about 250 to 300 aid trucks per day in the south.
“The level of suffering in Gaza defies our ability to capture it in words, or even to comprehend its scale,” said Joyce Msuya, the U.N.’s acting humanitarian chief to the Council. “Reality is brutal in Gaza, and it gets worse every day, as the bombs continue to fall, as fierce fighting continues unabated and as supplies essential for people’s survival and humanitarian assistance are blocked at every turn.”
Ms. Msuya told the Council that Israel’s military on Monday had detained U.N. aid workers who were evacuating severely burned patients to other hospitals in Gaza, holding them up at checkpoints for hours and threatening the lives of the injured.
“Medical staff kept one child alive by hand pumping oxygen for over seven hours until they made it through the checkpoint,” she said.
Mr. Danon didn’t respond to her comments when addressing the Council.
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