While the pauses will allow some children to receive life-saving polio vaccinations, they fall far short of what is urgently needed to pull Gaza back from the brink of a devastating health crisis and improve the dire living conditions that are enabling diseases to thrive. More than ten months of near-constant bombardment has left the entire population hungry, weakened, and traumatized, and destroyed most of the vital infrastructure needed to sustain life. Gaza needs a full and permanent ceasefire now so that aid –– including fuel, which is urgently needed to keep hospitals running –– can enter safely and at the enormous scale required to stop this catastrophic humanitarian crisis from deteriorating any further. The international community must increase its efforts to secure one, including halting arms sales to the Israeli government and imposing sanctions.
Humanitarian workers in Gaza continue to face appalling levels of danger while simply going about their jobs, with shocking incidents of aid vehicles being directly hit in recent days. This is entirely unacceptable: aid workers should never be a target, and their safety must be guaranteed. We are horrified by reports that at least five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli military airstrike on an aid convoy last night. We demand a thorough investigation into this incident and full accountability for those responsible.
ENDS
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ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 41 million people living in more than 71 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world, in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity, and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.