The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) warned that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are at risk in the northern and central Gaza Strip due to food shortages.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that the last time the agency was allowed to deliver supplies to the region was more than two weeks ago on January 23.

Other agencies providing humanitarian aid also reported preventing aid from reaching Gaza, which has been subjected to continuous Israeli aggression since October 7.

“Since the beginning of the year, half of our missions’ requests to send aid to the north have been rejected,” Lazzarini wrote on the X website on Thursday.

He said: “The United Nations has identified deep pockets of famine and hunger in northern Gaza,” adding, “At least 300,000 people living in the area depend on our aid for their survival.”

Large numbers of citizens were forcibly displaced from the north and center of the Gaza Strip to the south, searching for a safer place to protect them from the continuing Israeli bombing. More than half of Gaza’s population, estimated at about 2.4 million people, now lives in the city of Rafah in the south. But many of them are still in the Gaza Valley, in the center and north.

Georgios Petropoulos, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza, said that the area had turned "into a wasteland of hunger and despair."

He told Agence France-Presse that relief agencies are being prevented from working, while the few trucks that succeed in crossing are being intercepted by local residents who are in northern Gaza "on the brink of famine."

He continued, "They sometimes gather in their thousands around trucks and other vehicles loaded with goods and unload them in minutes."

The World Central Kitchen organization, which provides food aid, also reported that it was only able to reach northern Gaza “a limited number of times each week.”

She said in a statement that there are two trucks on their way now, one of them transporting meals to hospitals, and the other to deliver food to crowds on the road.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who toured the region this week, made a new appeal to provide more aid to Gaza.

“Blocking access prevents life-saving humanitarian aid,” Lazzarini wrote, adding, “With the necessary political will, this can easily be reversed.”

In an infinite toll, the number of martyrs in the Gaza Strip since the start of the aggression has risen to 27,840 martyrs and more than 67,300 wounded, and thousands of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, as the occupation prevents ambulance and rescue crews from reaching them.