Food supplies in southern Gaza at risk, says UN official [Video]

By Aidan Lewis

(Reuters) – Supplies of food to southern Gaza are at risk after Israel extended its military operations and those displaced by the offensive there face a public health crisis, a senior United Nations official said on Friday.

While hunger and the risk of famine has been most acute in northern Gaza in recent months, the situation is now deteriorating in the south, said Carl Skau, deputy director of the U.N. World Food Programme.

The main pipeline for aid earlier in the eight-month-old war was from Egypt into southern Gaza, but this was largely cut off when Israel expanded its campaign in the city of Rafah, where much of Gaza’s population was sheltering, from early May.

“We had stocked up before the operation in Rafah so that we had put food into the hands of people, but that’s beginning to run out and we don’t have the same access that we …