The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency said on Thursday that crowds of hungry people were stopping its aid trucks in Gaza and helping themselves to the food, making it almost impossible to continue delivering aid.
The UN World Food Program has said half of Gaza's population of 2.3 million is starving as Israel's military assault on the southern part of the enclave expands and people are cut off from supplies.
"People are stopping aid in trucks, taking the food and eating it right away. And this is how desperate and hungry they are," Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA commissioner-general, told reporters at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva.
Huge crowds on the street also mean that it is harder to reach hundreds of thousands of people in UN shelters in southern Gaza, Lazzarini said, speaking after a trip to Gaza.
"Hunger has now emerged over the last few weeks and we meet more and more people who haven't eaten for one two or three days," he added.
"...Our operating environment becomes more and more difficult. And the only way at this stage, in the absence of a ceasefire, to address it and to reverse this tension is to bring assistance at scale," Lazzarini said.
Aid deliveries crossing into Gaza via the sole entry point on the Egyptian border are only a fraction of pre-conflict levels despite the surge in needs.
On Thursday, Israel pounded the length of the Gaza Strip, killing families in their homes even as Washington sent an envoy to encourage its ally to guard better against civilian casualties in its war against Hamas.
Since October 7, Israeli forces have besieged the coastal strip and laid much of it to waste, with nearly 19,000 people confirmed dead, according to Palestinian health officials, and thousands more feared buried under the rubble.