US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend a humanitarian aid conference for the Gaza Strip hosted by Jordan on Tuesday as he continues his tour of the Middle East to broker a deal to end the war between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas to end.
The conference, called “Call for Action: Urgent Humanitarian Response for Gaza”, was organized by Jordan, Egypt and the UN.
The meeting will be attended by the leaders, foreign ministers and officials of 75 countries, as well as representatives of international organizations including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the conference website said.
“The war in Gaza has now entered its eighth month, with enormous loss of life among civilians and suffering for the entire population of over 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” organizers said.
“Famine is looming in many parts of Gaza; trauma is widespread; every part of Gaza is in ruins. No place is safe in the Gaza Strip, and access to food, water, shelter or medicine is virtually non-existent.”
To alleviate the suffering of the civilian population in the closed Palestinian territory, the conference aims, among other things, to “seek commitments to a collective, coordinated response to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
The Gaza War was sparked by the unprecedented Hamas attacks on October 7, in which militants killed about 1,200 people in southern Israeli communities and took another 250 hostage into Gaza, in what was the worst massacre in the country’s history.
Israel responded with massive airstrikes and launched a ground offensive on Gaza in late October. More than 36,500 Palestinians are said to have been killed in the ongoing fighting, and much of the coastal strip has become uninhabitable for those who remain.
Aid organizations on the ground have been emphasizing for months that the amounts of aid reaching the civilian population are not nearly enough.
