The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has resumed operations in Ethiopia’s Tigray region after fighting halted the emergency response last week.
Development Diaries reports that WFP has reached 10,000 people displaced by conflict with emergency food assistance and gave nutritionally fortified food to 3,000 women and children.
Before WFP resumed operations in the region, senior UN officials had appealed for immediate and unrestricted humanitarian access to Tigray – and for an end to deadly attacks on aid workers.
Some 1.7 million people have been displaced by fighting between Ethiopian troops and the Tigray Defence Force, with 60,000 refugees crossing the border into neighbouring Sudan.
Also, more than 1,200 incidents of serious sexual and gender-based violence have been reported.
‘We have the teams on the ground, trucks loaded and ready to go to meet the catastrophic food needs in the region’, WFP’s Emergency Coordinator, Tommy Thompson, said.
‘Following a ceasefire declaration by the Ethiopian government earlier this week [last week], the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a flash update on Friday that the political dynamics in the Tigray Region have changed “dramatically” ‘.
Since the unilateral ceasefire, the Tigray Defense Forces have reportedly taken control, as Ethiopian and Eritrean forces withdrew from the capital, Mekelle, and other parts of the region.
Key bridges, including one over the Tekeze River, crucial to delivering life-saving food, have been destroyed – hampering assistance to a region in which 91 percent of the population are in dire need, according to OCHA.
WFP has warned of serious challenges threatening the entire humanitarian response in the region.
As some of the last of WFP’s food stocks are now being delivered to families, the UN agency warned that lives would be lost if supply routes do not fully open, and combatants continue to disrupt or endanger the free movement of its humanitarian cargo.
‘What we need now is free, unfettered access and secure passage guaranteed by all parties to the conflict so we can deliver food safely’, Thompson added.
Source: UN News
Photo source: WFP
