COGAT accuses U.N. aid chief of 'libel' for claiming 10,000 aid trucks sat at Gaza border

"Israel accused the UN's Tom Fletcher of ‘libel’ for a second time, after the relief chief claimed there are ‘10,000 [aid] trucks on the [Gaza] border right now, cleared and ready to go,’ in a CNN interview on Monday.

‘We've got 10,000 trucks on the border right now, cleared, ready to go, and we'll do everything to get them in and save lives,’ Fletcher told CNN's Christine Amanpour.

When Amanpour repeated the number back to him incredulously, Fletcher nodded and replied, ‘full of food.’

Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) retweeted the video, saying, ‘Look, it's @UNReliefChief with another libelous lie.’

‘There are no 10 thousand trucks waiting to go into Gaza. What there are, are hundreds of trucks' worth of aid the UN hasn't picked up from the Gazan side over the last few days, after we gave you plenty of routes you can use to safely distribute the aid throughout the entire Gaza.’

This comes less than a week after Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within the next 48 hours unless aid reached them.

‘There are five trucks just sitting on the other side of the border right now,’ he said last Tuesday. ‘They have not reached the communities they need to reach. This is baby food, baby nutrition. There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) later retracted the claim when asked to verify by the BBC, saying it was rather about ‘the imperative of getting supplies in to save an estimated 14,000 babies suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Gaza.’..."