The World Food Program explains the lack of access to northern Gaza via Israel’s humanitarian operations in the 1950 Gazan Retention Facility and its violation of the Oslo Peace Constraints
Israel inspected and approved the goods that were going to Gaza. Andrés says they were not allowed to bring in machinery, equipment or the concrete blocks requested for the operation, but the aid organizations are improvising with what they have. Israel doesn’t allow a large range of goods to be allowed into Gaza, because it believes they could be used by Hamas.
Abeer Etefa is a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, and she said that the aid was distributed close to the fence to avoid crowds jumping on trucks to grab supplies. A convoy contained one truck full of flour and several food packages. She said the delivery came after six days of intense negotiations.
Ms. Etefa said that it revives the hope of continued access to northern Gaza over land. It is a good step, we just hope it isn’t a one-off.
The Times’ View of the Hamas-Bahamas Attack on the Gaza Strip: How much humanitarian aid is needed in the last five months?
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Last week, President Biden announced the military will be building a floating pier for aid deliveries off the coast of Gaza, as his administration grew frustrated by the Israeli government’s inability to allow humanitarian relief into the enclave. It will take several weeks for the pier to be ready.
The waters off the Gaza Strip are very shallow and it’s difficult to bring large ships in to bring goods onto the shore.
Since the start of the war, the WCK has been giving meals in Gaza and once the jetty is built, it will unload the cargo onto smaller boats and then distribute the aid to its 64 kitchens.
The need in Gaza is urgent, says Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, warning of a “massive deterioration” if aid doesn’t reach people immediately.
The European Union foreign policy chief told the United Nations Security Council that the humanitarian crisis is made by man, and that when we look for alternative ways of giving support by air, we have to remind.
“When we condemn this happening in Ukranian, we must use the same words for what is happening in Gaza, becausevation is being used as a war arm,” Borrell said.
When Israel launched its air, sea and ground offensive, in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on the country, it targeted northern Gaza first. The north has remained largely cut off since. The United Nations believes up to 300,000 people are still in Gaza, where there is little to no access to food and water and barely functioning hospitals.
In northern Gaza, which has been mostly cut off by Israeli forces over the last 5 months, one in 6 children under the age of 2 is acutely malnourished.
Abed Amin, a 35-year-old who lives in Gaza City and takes care of his three sisters, says he hasn’t gotten any aid since the start of the war over five months ago. Sometimes he borrows money from his friends to buy canned mushrooms or olives at a steep price on the black market. But these days, they mostly grind animal feed to a sort of flour.
Taghreed Al, the mother of four daughters in northern Gaza, said she spoiled her children before the war when she made whatever they wanted for dinner. She has had to teach her daughters how to live on one loaf of bread a day.
Recently, an airdropped package landed on the roof of her two-story home. He found boxes of food as he rushed up. She realized a large crowd behind her, many of them holding knives and some even armed, and she turned around.
“What we need to do is flood the north with food so it doesn’t become a very prized commodity. If people in the north could see the fact that on a daily basis there was regular supplies of trucks of food, medicine and other key commodities, I think the desperation would not be there. The insecurity wouldn’t be there either,” McGoldrick says.
The issue of aid inspection in Gaza: “It’s all in Israeli” and “you’re going to have to live in Israel,” says Friedman
“Israel works tirelessly on finding ways to get humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza,” says Shimon Friedman, spokesperson for Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. “And we’ve gone through to great lengths to increase our capacity of inspection in order to facilitate additional aid.”
The aid trucks have not been allowed into Gaza by the Israeli government until hostages freed by Hamas are taken from Israel.
The fact that the trucks had to go through airdrops in order to get through shows that we’re succeeding, said one of the organizers of the protest at Nitzana crossing. The sit-in prevented the trucks from being inspected.
Friedman says any problems with the distribution and flow of aid are the fault of aid organizations for not having enough “manpower” to deal with the demand.
The Association of International Development Agencies, which includes dozens of nongovernmental aid groups, says the Israel Welfare Ministry stopped renewing visas for humanitarian workers in February.
There are some factors that could affect the aid flow in Israel, says the director of advocacy at Gisha, an organization that monitors the rights of Palestinians in Gaza.
Before Oct. 7, the aid agencies that were active in the area only procured goods through Israel. So, the adjustment of having to purchase all of their goods in Egypt or import goods that they need has in itself been a hindering factor and is impacting aid operations,” Marmur says.
The fuel cap imposed by Israel affects every facet of humanitarian operation, including communication, because of the electrical power failure.
They need to allow unrestricted access by the humanitarians. And that’s not happening often enough or we have many deconfliction issues,” McGoldrick says. There are a lot of issues that have been notified. We are blocked or diverted at the same time. We’ve seen some trucks being actually hit by military fire as well.”
Georgios Petropoulos, who heads the U.N. humanitarian coordination sub-office in Gaza, describes what he recently saw driving around in the Gaza Strip as “profoundly grotesque.”
“I could see civil defense vehicles annihilated. I saw ambulances cut in half by machine gun fire. At the same time I saw primary health care centers shut up, there was a war of aggression and violence in the area.
“It will be very easy to solve if we will be able to open other entry points around Israel that can double or triple the amount of trucks reaching Gaza every single day,” Andrés says. “But for various reasons this is not happening and this is out of our control.”
The World Central Kitchen wants to use its existing distribution network as well as add to the number of kitchens it operates in Gaza to make and distribute meals. Andrés says so far the aid organization has provided more than 35 million meals there.
The amount of aid given to Gaza last month was half of what had been received in the previous month, as Israel’s allies with the humanitarian crisis were starting to lose patience.
The United States insists it is pressing Israel to allow in more aid by land but has promised to set up a floating dock to deliver aid in bigger ships. The project will take a long time and still face obstacles in distributing aid.
The United States and other partner countries have started airdropping aid into Gaza. With ongoing fighting, it’s almost impossible to distribute the airdrops on the ground.
The main land entry for aid to Gaza through Egypt has 30,000 trucks backed up waiting for entry, says Ahmed Naimat, a spokesman for Jordan’s National Center for Security and Crisis Management.
The Jetty for the Gazan Hospitals: Progress and Challenges in the Near-Focused Interaction Between the Hamas, Jordan and Gaza
Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel, has accused the Israeli military of deliberately targeting its field hospitals in Gaza. Israel has said it was aiming at Hamas militants.
The mission, which began Tuesday, is expected to take several days because of the slow speed necessitated by the heavily laden barge, and the logistics of building the floating jetty.
“We have to be cautious and we have to follow all the protocols that we have in order to have a good end to this,” she says, adding there is food waiting at the port in Cyprus for an immediate second trip if the first goes well.
Lanuza says each box of food was individually scanned under supervision of Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories at Larnaca port in Cyprus to ensure it did not have contraband before it was loaded onto the barge and then the entire shipment sealed.
Laura Lanuza says that it took three weeks to deal with regulations after a boat arrived in Cyprus.
“We have crews working 24-7 and we are really trying to build this 60-meter [yard]-long jetty that will allow us then successfully, if things go well, to start bringing in humanitarian aid in bigger quantities,” Andrés says.
Five months of intense Israeli bombing added to previous destruction and an Israeli blockade of Gaza devastated the infrastructure of the area.
“It’s behind us and the hardest part is the diplomatic technicalities”, says Andrés. “The most difficult part ahead is as we speak, we are finalizing the construction of a temporary jetty.”
Aid groups have had to rely on Israeli cooperation to try and get aid to Gaza, while also attempting to find alternative routes because of Israeli restrictions.
Israel’s military on Thursday said it supported new initiatives to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, air and sea, just hours after the military’s chief spokesman said it was trying to “flood” the enclave with sorely needed aid.
Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst and a columnist at Haaretz, said that Israel is coming under pressure from all sides and that images emerging from Gaza of emaciated, starving children may have been “a tipping point” for policymakers. “There’s a limit to how much opprobrium Israel is willing to take and stand behind and say we are in the right,” she said.
The time and cost of getting aid by sea: How fast can a Floating Pier be constructed for maritime aid? A U.S. Department of Interior and Environment
Airdrops are ineffective and largely symbolic, these groups say, able to deliver just a fraction of the food that a truck convoy can haul. Setting up the infrastructure for aid deliveries by sea will be expensive and take time: U.S. officials have said that it could be weeks before a floating pier for maritime aid is up and running.