The United Nations on Tuesday announced the appointment of a coordinator to oversee humanitarian relief shipments into Gaza as part of a UN Security Council resolution to boost humanitarian aid, which was approved this past Friday, Reuters reported.
Sigrid Kaag, the Netherlands' outgoing finance minister, will be the senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza and will start the role on January 8, the UN said in a statement.
"In this role she will facilitate, coordinate, monitor and verify humanitarian relief consignments for Gaza," said the UN, adding that Kaag will also establish a "mechanism" to accelerate aid into Gaza through countries not involved with the conflict.
Kaag was previously the head of an international team of weapons experts charged with overseeing the elimination of Syria's chemical stockpile.
Ynet noted that she has a problematic past as far as Israel is concerned, as she clashed with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte over his support for Israel.
Kaag is married to Anis al-Qaq, a Palestinian Arab who served as a deputy minister under former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat in the 1990s and as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to Switzerland.
The resolution which was adopted on Friday after being postponed several times due to disagreements over its wording, stopped short of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. It calls for "urgent steps to immediately allow safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access and to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities."
The vote was 13 in favor and zero against. Both the United States and Russia abstained.
Before the vote, the US vetoed a Russian amendment which demanded an immediate end to the war.
Earlier this month, the Security Council attempted a vote on a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, but the US vetoed the proposal.
In mid-October, a Russian-drafted UN Security Council resolution, that would have called for a humanitarian ceasefire in the war in Gaza, failed to pass after it did not achieve the minimum nine votes needed in the 15-member body.
The text was controversial because, while it referred to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, it did not directly name Hamas, whose terrorists murdered at least 1,200 people in Israel on October 7.
In late October, Russia and China vetoed a US-drafted UN Security Council resolution on the war between Israel and Hamas.