By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO, April 23 (Reuters) – The Iran war is having a devastating humanitarian impact globally with higher energy prices making everything from filling the tank of an aid lorry to paying employees and buying food for displaced people costlier, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council said on Thursday.
The NRC is one of the world’s leading non-governmental aid organisations focused on displacement. Its boss, Jan Egeland, was the United Nations’ top humanitarian official between 2003 and 2006.
“We have 1,500 vehicles in our operations; they run on diesel. In some countries, it’s twice the cost now to run those,” Egeland told foreign reporters at NRC headquarters in Oslo.
“The generators needed in the places we haven’t solarized yet are much more expensive, so running a school or a hospital (is more expensive),” he said.
“The food that we have to purchase on the market – local markets, regional markets – has become much more expensive per family in need. And our staff find it very hard to live on the salary that we can give them compared to before.”
The result is the NRC will help fewer people than before, at a time when needs are “exploding,” and funding from the vast majority of donor countries has been redirected to defence budgets, Egeland said.
“Through this year, fewer people will get assistance because of the cost increase,” he said.
GAZA RESTRICTIONS
The NRC has been active in the occupied Palestinian territories since 2009, including during the Gaza war.
In February, the Israeli Supreme Court temporarily blocked Israel’s government from shuttering the Gaza operations of dozens of aid organizations, which petitioned the court in a dispute over new Israeli rules requiring them to name Palestinian staff.
But the NRC still lost its registration with Israeli authorities, Egeland said. While it still has local staff in the Gaza Strip, it cannot send international staff to support them.
“We have already had to relocate our headquarters to Amman,” he said. “We do remote leadership management from Amman.”
He praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza as “wonderful” because “it stopped the massacres and the full-scale war.”
“But we are now frozen in some halfway house where Israel is still militarily there,” he said. “They’re still destroying homes. Hamas is not disarmed and the aid groups are denied access. This is no peace. This is no implementation. The Trump peace plan is in grave danger.”
Israel, which controls all access to the Gaza Strip, denies withholding supplies for its more than 2 million residents.
Yet Palestinians and international aid bodies say supplies reaching the territory are still insufficient, despite a ceasefire reached in January that included guarantees of increased aid.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in OsloEditing by Rod Nickel)
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