LONDON (Reuters) -Britain and more than 20 other countries called on Monday for an immediate end to the war in Gaza and criticised the Israeli government’s aid delivery model after hundreds of Palestinians were killed near sites distributing food.
France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada, Denmark and other countries said more than 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid and condemned what it called the “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians”.
The majority of those killed were in the vicinity of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites, which the United States and Israel backed to take over aid distribution in Gaza from a network led by the United Nations.
“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the countries’ foreign ministers said in a joint statement.
The call for an end to the war and the way Israel delivers aid comes from several countries which are allied with Israel and its most important backer, the United States.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation uses private U.S. security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a U.N.-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians. Hamas denies the accusation.
The U.N. has called the GHF’s model unsafe and a breach of humanitarian impartiality standards, which GHF denies.
(Reporting by Muvija M and Andrew MacAskill, editing by Elizabeth Piper)
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