UNITED NATIONS, United States: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Friday for Israel to end a ban on humanitarian agencies that provided aid in Gaza, saying he was \u201cdeeply concerned\u201d at the development.<\/p>\n
Guterres \u201ccalls for this measure to be reversed, stressing that international non-governmental organizations are indispensable to life-saving humanitarian work and that the suspension risks undermining the fragile progress made during the ceasefire,\u201d his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis recent action will further exacerbate the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Israel on Thursday suspended 37 foreign humanitarian organizations from accessing the Gaza Strip after they had refused to share lists of their Palestinian employees with government officials.<\/p>\n
The ban includes Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has 1,200 staff members in the Palestinian territories \u2014 the majority of whom are in Gaza.<\/p>\n
NGOs included in the ban have been ordered to cease their operations by March 1.<\/p>\n
Several NGOS have said the requirements contravene international humanitarian law or endanger their independence.<\/p>\n
Israel says the new regulation aims to prevent bodies it accuses of supporting terrorism from operating in the Palestinian territories.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, 18 Israel-based left-wing NGOs denounced the decision to ban their international peers, saying \u201cthe new registration framework violates core humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality.\u201d<\/p>\n
A fragile ceasefire has been in place since October, following a deadly war waged by Israel in response to Hamas\u2019s unprecedented October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.<\/p>\n
In November, authorities in Gaza said more than 70,000 people had been killed there since the war broke out.<\/p>\n
Nearly 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by the war, according to UN data, leaving infrastructure decimated.<\/p>\n
About 1.5 million of Gaza\u2019s more than two million residents have lost their homes, said Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
UNITED NATIONS, United States: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Friday for Israel to end a ban on humanitarian agencies that provided aid in Gaza, saying he was \u201cdeeply concerned\u201d at the development. Guterres \u201ccalls for this measure to be reversed, stressing that international non-governmental organizations are indispensable to life-saving humanitarian work and that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":91815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91816,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91797\/revisions\/91816"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}