UNITED NATIONS — Israel and the vast U.N. bureaucracy established to aid Palestinian Arabs locked horns yesterday over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the means to ease it, and accusations that the Palestinian Arabs “spin” the humanitarian situation for propaganda purposes.

The dispute, highlighted in competing statements by the U.N. humanitarian coordinator, Jan Egeland, and the Israeli army’s point man, Colonel Nir Peres, came as Prime Minister Olmert approved further military incursion into central Gaza, widening a military operation meant to release a kidnapped Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, and stop a barrage of Kassam rockets.

Arab diplomats on the Security Council, meanwhile, struggled to salvage a proposed resolution designed to halt the Israeli military operation. To their original one-sided proposal, diplomats headed by Qatar yesterday added calls for the “immediate and unconditional release” of Corporal Shalit and “immediate and sustained” efforts by the Palestinian Authority to halt the rocket attacks.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is “deteriorating,” Mr. Egeland told reporters yesterday. “Some of the population is totally without electricity and water, which increases diarrhea, which increases disease, which increases anger.”

The Palestinian Arab observer at the United Nations, Riad Mansour, told The New York Sun that Israel is “trying to make the lives of 1.4 million inhabitants inside Gaza extremely difficult.”

But Colonel Peres denied there was hunger or a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and stressed that efforts are being made to assure the delivery of basic foodstuffs. “I know of no one who ever died because of lack of sugar,” Colonel Peres told Israeli reporters yesterday, according to Ynet. While acknowledging that no regular food deliveries are currently going into Gaza, he added that wheat and other basic necessities “will not run out in a day or two, or even four.”

Israel stopped traffic into Gaza on Sunday through one entry point, known as the Karni Crossing. According to Mr. Egeland, a line of idle supply trucks on the border began “accumulating surcharges in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Israeli officials told the Sun yesterday that the army closed the Karni Crossing only after receiving “specific” terrorist threats. Last April, Colonel Peres noted, a car bomb exploded in the Karni Crossing. Tunnels said to be used by terrorists were recently found near the crossing.

Israel, he added, has offered to open up an alternative entry for the use of humanitarian trucks through the southern Gaza Kerem Shalom crossing. The Palestinian Arabs balked for political reasons, he said.

A U.N. official at Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the Sun yesterday that the Kerem Shalom crossing lacks the “cargo capacity to get the containers through.” But Israeli officials countered that several months ago trucks with large containers did go through it.

According to Colonel Peres, goods-filled containers went through another Gaza entry point, the Erez crossing, on Monday. In the past, he said, Palestinian Arab officials often claimed they had low supplies of wheat. “It was a spin,” he said. “We closed Karni, and they refused to receive goods from any other crossing.”

The Security Council resolution that was considered by diplomats yesterday was “unacceptable because it’s not balanced,” a spokesman for the American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, Richard Grenell, told the Sun.

“Under the banner of having a draft resolution be balanced, we should be sure that it would really be balanced,” the Palestinian Arab observer, Mr. Mansour, said. Otherwise “it would be difficult for the council to assume its responsibilities.”

One element not mentioned in the current draft was Israel’s complete evacuation of Gaza last August. A new plan, published last week by a former American Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, would have the council declare an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and consider any hostile acts from the area “illegitimate.”

Mr. Ross’s plan, first published on the Washington Post’s Web site last week, was widely distributed in the Arab world. It called on the Palestinian Arab leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to declare a state of emergency, disband the current Hamas-led government, form a new government “with no members of Hamas or Fatah in it,” and create a credible security force that was “professionally led and answerable” to Mr. Abbas, which would impose law and order.

Only once Hamas and Fatah are replaced by such a structure, Mr. Ross’s plan states, should international donors put together an “emergency package of assistance to permit this new government to deliver.”

But the European Commission said yesterday that it has begun delivering $750,000 in monthly aid to Gaza hospitals through an internationally backed plan bypassing the Hamas-led government, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Egeland told reporters that while donors promised the U.N. humanitarian machinery $385 million for 2006, only $117 million has been delivered to date.