As the Israel Defense Force intensifies its assault on Hamas, Gazan protesters against the terror organization’s hold on the Strip are reportedly ransacking a United Nations Relief and Works Agency warehouse, seeking food. The incident is reigniting a debate over the UN’s one-sided approach to the Gaza war. 

“A throng of Gazan opponents of Hamas entered an Unrwa food storage warehouse, taking sacks of flour,” Kann News  reported Wednesday, adding that the event followed Hamas’s theft of food deliveries. The Israeli public broadcaster posted on X a video of the raucous goings-on inside the warehouse, from which men threw sacks to the crowds below. 

“On the morning of 2 April, at the UNRWA Tuffah Distribution Centre in Gaza City, an armed individual, who eyewitnesses describe as desperate to obtain flour, approached the site and fired shots in the air,” a UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, tells the Sun, adding that Hamas police “intervention resulted in the individual being shot and seriously injured.” Subsequent reports indicate the individual died.

”The incident rapidly escalated. Thousands of people gathered at the scene, leading to widespread looting and the destruction of the distribution centre and surrounding buildings,” the spokesman said. “The looting, while devastating, is not surprising in the face of total systemic collapse. We are witnessing the consequences of a society brought to its knees by prolonged siege and violence.”

Officials of the world body accuse Israel of starving the Strip’s residents, saying that food in Gaza has been drying up since the cease-fire collapsed after Hamas rejected an American-proposed deal to release hostages and extend the cease-fire. 

“Yesterday, all 25 subsidized bakeries supported by the World Food Program were closed,” the UN humanitarian coordination office’s head of Palestinian operations, Jonathan Whittall, told reporters Wednesday. “And yet we’re told, and I find this very difficult to hear, that Gaza has enough food because supplies have entered during a month-long cease-fire following a year in which supplies were literally drip-fed into the Gaza Strip.”

The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories posted data on X on Tuesday, arguing that in Gaza there is “enough food for a long period of time, if Hamas lets the civilians have it.” Cogat noted that international and non-governmental organizations are responsible for nearly 70 percent of humanitarian donations to Gaza, while the UN handles less than 30 percent of it. 

Israel intensified its combat activity in Gaza on Wednesday, saying that only military pressure would force Hamas to release hostages. “We are cutting up the Strip, and we are increasing the pressure step by step, so that they will give us our hostages,” Prime Minister Netanayhu said, as the IDF established new defense zones inside Gaza, ending the Strip’s southern zone around Rafah for the first time since the cease-fire agreement of January 19. 

The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, “is increasingly concerned about inflammatory rhetoric, calling for the Israeli military to ‘capture extensive territory that will be added to the state of Israel’s security areas,’” his spokesman said Wednesday. “Large-scale Israeli bombardments and ground operations have resulted in widespread destruction and the displacement of over 100,000 Palestinians from Rafah.”

Mr. Guterres is also “shocked by the attack by the Israeli army on a medical and emergency convoy on 23 March resulting in the killing of 15 medical personnel and humanitarian workers in Gaza,” Mr. Haq said. Algeria, the Arab representative on the UN Security Council, asked for an emergency gathering of the body, which is expected to meet on Thursday afternoon. 

“The IDF did not randomly attack an ambulance on March 23,” its English-language spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, wrote Sunday on X. Without IDF coordination, vehicles with no headlights approached the Israeli troops that then fired at them.  

“Following an initial assessment, it was determined that the forces had eliminated a Hamas military operative, Mohammad Amin Ibrahim Shubaki, who took part in the October 7 massacre, along with 8 other terrorists from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad,” Colonel Shoshani wrote.