The order arrived as the UN prepared to start a campaign to vaccinate about 640,000 children under the age of 10 in Gaza against polio, days after a 10-month-old baby was paralyzed by the Type 2 poliovirus.
"We're unable to deliver today with the conditions that we're in. As of this morning, we're not operating in Gaza," a senior UN official told Reuters. "Where do we move now?"
Despite the stoppage, the UN is not officially suspending aid operations in Gaza. (Related: United Nations accuses Israel of BLOCKING humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza Strip.)
"We're not leaving because the people need us there. We're trying to balance the need of the population with the need for safety and security of the UN personnel," the official added.
The UN's main operations center had formerly been in Rafah, in southern Gaza, until Israel evacuated over a million Palestinians from the area early this year.
Israel targeting areas assigned as humanitarian zones in Gaza
Gaza's people have many times stated that there are no so-called safe zones in the beleaguered strip, with Israel still targeting areas assigned as humanitarian zones.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) continued to provide health and other services but said it was encountering severe problems. The Israeli military has already killed more than 200 UNRWA staff.
"We are being squeezed into ever smaller areas of Gaza," Sam Rose, a senior field director at UNRWA said in an interview. "The humanitarian zone declared by Israel has shrunk. It's now about 11 percent of the entire Gaza Strip. But this isn't 11 percent of land that is fit for habitation, fit for services, fit for life."
As reported by the UNRWA, only three out of 18 water wells in Deir al-Balah were working, leading to an 85 percent water shortfall.
Rose said over 3,000 people were set to work on the polio vaccination campaign, which is set to start on Saturday, Aug. 31. The case of the baby with Type 2 polio was the first such case in Gaza in 25 years.
According to Louise Wateridge, senior communications officer for UNRWA, the situation in Gaza was "just catastrophic."
"The last couple of weeks we have had relentlessly forced displacement orders in the middle area, in the southern area, and also in northern Gaza Strip, and what we're seeing here is hundreds of thousands of people forced to move on a daily basis," Wateridge said.
The World Food Program said it had managed "to bring in only half of the 24,000 metric tons of food aid required for operations serving 1.1 million people."
Israeli soldiers have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians since the war started in October last year, the majority of whom are women and children.
Humanitarian agencies said most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced more than once and confront acute shortages of food and medicine.
Follow Humanitarian.news for more news about the humanitarian operations happening in Gaza.
Watch the video below about the UN readying 1.6 million doses of polio "vaccine" for the children in Gaza.
This video is from the The Prisoner channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
UN staff member killed, another injured in another attack as Israel deliberately targets aid workers.
UN halts food distribution from U.S.-built pier in Gaza due to safety concerns.
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