Today's top news: Occupied Palestinian Territory, Sudan

Palestinian girls use a wheelchair to carry water in Khan Younis city, in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba

Occupied Palestinian Territory

Displaced families in Gaza continue to face dire conditions and significant challenges in accessing basic services. That is according to multiple humanitarian assessments carried out over the past month.

OCHA led two such assessments last week at informal displacement sites in Deir al Balah, where thousands of people are sheltering. Families there said shelters are overcrowded and lack sanitation infrastructure. Food distributions are irregular, and residents reported a range of health issues, such as hepatitis A, skin diseases, and respiratory illnesses. Access to water is also critically low. At one displacement site, the average amount of water available per day was just point-7 (0.7) litres, well below the internationally recognized minimum requirement for survival of three litres per day.

Humanitarian partners working on water, sanitation and hygiene in Gaza report that critical infrastructure continues to sustain significant damage. They say the recent intensification of military operations has resulted in additional losses of key water and sanitation assets, including five water production wells in Jabalya, in the north, as well as two water wells and two desalination plants in Rafah, in the south.

These partners estimate that over the past eight months, more than two-thirds of water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged due to the conflict. Many other facilities have been put out of service due to a range of challenges, including insecurity, access impediments, and lack of power and fuel to operate generators.

OCHA underscores that humanitarian operations in Gaza must be fully facilitated and all impediments must be lifted.

UNICEF’s spokesman James Elder said one of the agency’s trucks carrying medicines and nutrition supplies for 10,000 children in Gaza was turned back on Wednesday – despite approvals for the mission. Elder says they were held for eight hours at checkpoints, and it took 13 hours to move just 40 kilometres.

Sudan

The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, warned that the humanitarian nightmare in Al Fasher, Sudan, the capital of North Darfur, is worsening by the hour.

In a social media post, he said he hopes the Security Council resolution adopted yesterday will ease the suffering of civilians in the city.

Griffiths said they must be protected, aid must be able to reach them and the fighting must stop now.

Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) in Sudan has underscored the urgency of getting food to people in need before rains cut off access to remote areas. The agency reports that a convoy carrying aid for some 160,000 people crossed into Darfur this week from Chad. It is the third convoy to enter the country via the Tine border crossing in the past two months. That assistance is bound for Central, East and West Darfur.

WFP says food distributions are also underway for more than 50,000 people in South Darfur, as well as an estimated 200,000 people in Aj Jazirah State. The distributions there are the first since conflict spread to the state capital Wad Medani and other parts of Sudan's breadbasket in December.