The New Yorker:

As “imminent” famine looms, Israel’s legislature has voted to ban the main U.N. relief agency for Palestinians.

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, a United Nations-backed group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee, warned that parts of the Gaza Strip were at risk of “imminent” famine. Since the war began, more than a year ago, it has been difficult to get aid into the territory. This summer, there had been slight progress in increasing the amount of food and medicine arriving, but, in August, those efforts began to stall as Israel stymied delivery operations. Aid organizations and the United Nations have made clear that the humanitarian emergency is especially acute in Gaza’s north. The situation has worsened to such a degree that the Biden Administration, which has continued supplying arms to Israel despite the war resulting in more than forty-three thousand deaths, has once again said that future arms shipments might be reduced unless access to humanitarian aid improves. (A letter signed in mid-October by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gave Israel thirty days to increase the flow of aid. On Tuesday, it missed the deadline, and the Biden Administration said that it wouldn’t follow through on its threat to cut off military support.) Late last month, the Israeli government passed a pair of laws that banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (unrwa) from operating in Israel, starting in late January. (Israel’s government has accused unrwa, which had thirteen thousand mainly Palestinian employees working in Gaza prior to October 7th, of being “a terrorist organization,” infiltrated with hundreds of members of Hamas, but has provided little evidence to support that claim; a U.N. spokesperson acknowledged to the Times that as many as nine employees likely did take part in the October 7th attacks.)

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