A UN agency has suspended emergency food aid to half of the eligible refugees living in occupied Palestinian lands after Israel imposed new restrictions on the movement of aid containers.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees said it stopped distributing rice, flour, cooking oil and other essential foods to some 600,000 refugees in the Gaza strip, where nearly two out of three families live below the poverty line and more than half the work force is unemployed.
The suspension does not affect deliveries in the West Bank, where about the same number of refugees depend on aid from the UN agency.
The suspension "will further distress communities already struggling to cope with unrelieved economic hardship and malnutrition," UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said in a statement released at UN headquarters in New York.
"If the new restrictions in Gaza continue, I fear we could see real hunger emerge for the first time in two generations. Israel's legitimate, and serious, security concerns will not be served by hindering the emergency relief work of the United Nations," Mr Hansen said.
The agency said it acted after Israel restricted UNRWA's ability to take empty shipping containers out of Gaza at the sole commercial crossing it can use to serve the area.
According to media reports, Israel has said suicide bombers hid in such containers to leave Gaza and carry out attacks which killed 10 people last month in the Israeli port Ashdod.
The suspension, which is blocking delivery of 11,000 tons of food, was needed because continued deliveries while the rented containers were stuck in Gaza would cause "a bottleneck which would result in prohibitive costs," UNRWA said.
The food aid is part of an emergency program launched after a September 2000 uprising in Gaza and the West Bank that has locked Israelis and Palestinians into a 42-month cycle of violence.