U.N.: Israel's border closures halting Gaza food aid

Another warehouse holds just a few crates of lunch meat and space usually filled with oil and powdered milk is taken up by air conditioners for medical centers yet to be built.

Israel has kept its borders with Gaza shut for nine days in response to Palestinian rocket and mortar fire. On Thursday, the U.N. warned its stocks had run so low that it would not be able to make its next delivery of food to 750,000 needy Gazans on Saturday.

"We've been working here from hand to mouth for quite a long time, so these interruptions on the crossing points affect us immediately," said John Ging, director of U.N. Relief and Works Agency operations in Gaza.

Israel's Defense Ministry had said it would allow 30 truckloads of humanitarian supplies into Gaza on Thursday. But the crossings were kept shut because militants fired fire rockets and mortars into Israel earlier in the day, Israeli security officials said.

Speaking in Brussels, Belgium, UNRWA head Karen AbuZayd said it was unsual for Israel not to let basic food and medicines in.

"This has alarmed us more than usual because it's never been quite so long and so bad, and there has never been so much negative response on what we need," she said.

"We have hundreds of containers waiting in Ashdod port, holding such simple things such as the wool and the yarn for vocational training centers or centers for the visually impaired to make some money," she said. "We were told these are not humanitarian supplies."

The crisis is only the latest since Islamic militants from Hamas overran the Gaza Strip last year. Hamas and Israel are bitter enemies. Hamas does not recognize a place for a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East and has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel, which in turn labels Hamas a terror group.

To pressure Hamas, Israel imposed a blockade, allowing only minimal humanitarian supplies and an occasional trickle of commercial goods into the territory. All but one of Gaza's crossings are into Israel. The exception is Rafah, which leads to Egypt but Egypt is also enforcing a blockade.

Among the items UNRWA has not been able to get into Gaza are fire extinguishers for its facilities, tires for its vehicles, toner for the photocopiers in its schools and clinics and materials for a blind children's center, said UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness.

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