NEW YORK | 3 December 2024 (IDN) — While organized looting has constrained UNRWA to pause relief deliveries to Palestinian refugees, the sudden escalation of fighting in Syria’s northwest is continuing to impact aid deliveries there. Meanwhile, UN summit has got underway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to combat desertification, drought and promote land restoration, writes Daniel Johnson of UN News.
Gaza
Deliveries of desperately needed food and other supplies into Gaza have had to be halted through the Kerem Shalom crossing because of looting by armed gangs, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has announced.
The agency took the decision on Sunday (1 December) after it said that lorries carrying food were “all taken” after crossing into Gaza through what is the main aid corridor.
Explaining the move, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that the route had not been safe “for months”. On 16 November, a large convoy of aid trucks which also crossed through Kerem Shalom was stolen by armed gangs.
Further inside Gaza, aid workers are deeply concerned that malnutrition levels are spiralling and affecting children in particular.
UNRWA Senior Emergencies Officer, Louise Wateridge, speaking from one of the UN agency’s schools in Deir Al-Balah where 6,000 people are sheltering told UN News:
“The family are sleeping with their head on the mattress and the rest of their bodies on the cold floor on the wet floor. One of the children, she’s three years old, she tripped in the school in the night, going to the bathroom and she has fractured her leg. And the doctors are saying there’s no improvement. It’s not getting any better because she’s so malnourished. As I was in the as in in the room with the family, there was another young child crying and screaming in the corner, just screaming for a piece of bread. She was just crying for a piece of bread.”
Syria
Some 560 kilometres away, the sudden escalation of fighting in the Syria’s northwest continues to impact aid deliveries there.
“Humanitarian operations across Aleppo, Idlib, and Hama remain largely suspended,” the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, reported in its latest update, which also highlighted an uptick in violence in Homs.
The UN agency said that the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) continues to provide assistance on the ground, after five days of fighting between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fighters and government forces that have shifted front lines in multiple locations.
In Aleppo and Idlib, civilians remaining in affected areas have been severely impacted, with hospital admissions suspended in Aleppo along with problems accessing water and bakeries.
OCHA has also cited reports that the Khanaser-Atharaya road has been cut off by the fighting; it’s an essential exit route for internally displaced persons fleeing Aleppo.
Even before the latest violence, Syria’s humanitarian crisis was already one of the world’s most severe, with more than 16.7 million people in need of assistance.
War in Gaza and then Lebanon has pushed more than half a million returnees and refugees from Lebanon into Syria, since September.
UN summit to combat desertification
About 1140 km away in Saudi Arabia, a UN-convened summit got underway on 2 December to combat desertification and drought.
These two global problems linked to climate change continue to destroy people’s livelihoods everywhere and stoke tensions between communities.
The 16th meeting of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP16) in Riyadh has brought together governments, NGOs and UN agencies.
Early discussions focused on holding back desertification of previously fertile land, first, by preventing its mismanagement and second, by promoting investment for drought adaptation measures and land restoration initiatives.
Ibrahim Thiaw, the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), told delegates that “land restoration is primarily about nurturing humanity itself”, as the “way we manage our land today will directly determine the future of life on Earth”.
Mr Thiaw spoke of his personal experience of meeting farmers, mothers, and young people affected by the loss of land, with the “cost of land degradation” seeping into “every corner of their lives”.
“They see the rising price of groceries, in unexpected energy surcharges, and in the growing strain on their communities,” he said, adding that “land and soil loss are robbing poor families of nutritious food, and children of a safe future”.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 60 per cent of land degradation impacts farmland. To prevent further damage and loss of livelihoods, the UN agency insisted that smallholder farmers and local communities need access to finance, urgently. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Collage of images from UNRWA, OCHA and UNCCD-COP16
