Why isn't enough food getting into Gaza?

Mint

a day ago

JERUSALEM—About 10 miles stand between truckloads of food and flour and the more than two million hungry Palestinians who need it. Yet only a trickle is reaching them.
The biggest obstacle right now between stockpiles of food just beyond the border and Gaza's most vulnerable people—starving children, women, elderly and injured—is a breakdown of law and order. Chaotic mobs ransack every food-bearing truck that enters, aid workers say. The masses are largely made up of desperate civilians, armed criminals looking to sell it on the black market—or a dangerous mix of both.
Officials and aid groups have no control over where it goes from there.
Antoine Renard, a United Nations official in Gaza, recalls how a wave of gaunt-faced men converged on his armored vehicle and the convoy of aid trucks following him as they tried to reach the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah on Tuesday. He said the vehicle rocked from side to side as the men swarmed, jostling over the cargo.
'I've never seen anything even a little bit like this," said Renard, who has worked with the U.N.'s food agency, the World Food Program, for more than 20 years and now heads its operations in the Palestinian territories. 'I have never, ever seen this level of despair."
Israel and the U.N. have traded blame for the worsening hunger crisis that experts warn is now tipping into famine. Israel says the U.N. has failed to distribute the food that it allowed in. The U.N. says Israel created impossible conditions that put staff and civilians at risk, while impeding their work with delays and restrictions on movement.
At the core of the crisis is extreme and widespread food scarcity. Israel banned all aid and commercial goods from entering Gaza in early March in what it said was an effort to pressure Hamas. Israel says the group steals aid to fund its war effort, which Hamas denies. Aid groups say they have seen no evidence of systematic diversion.
Israel started letting in much smaller volumes of aid in late May as food supplies dwindled, but it hasn't been nearly enough.
The World Food Program says almost 95% of its trucks entering the Gaza Strip are looted before they reach their destination. It says the only solution is to flood the enclave with food until scarcity no longer drives civilians to risk their lives for a bag of flour, or provides an opportunity for militants and criminals to exploit their desperation.
Under growing international pressure, Israel took steps recently to ease the flow of aid. It started with airdrops, then announced a pause in fighting in some parts of the strip and the creation of humanitarian corridors. Israeli officials say the country isn't blocking aid and is doing more to facilitate it.
'The bottleneck, regarding food reaching the people of Gaza, is the U.N. agencies not distributing the aid, not picking it up and not distributing it," a senior Israeli military official told The Wall Street Journal.
Until Israel recently eased some restrictions, the U.N. also had difficulty getting aid in at all. Part of the problem stemmed from the overall unworkable conditions of destroyed roads, chronic fuel shortages and frequent fighting along what few routes were available, despite deconfliction efforts.
Medical workers say they are now battling the worst hunger crisis to grip the enclave since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked the war in Gaza. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, a group of experts set up to study hunger crises around the world, said Tuesday that the 'worst-case scenario of famine" is currently unfolding in Gaza.
Since a cease-fire collapsed in March, Israel has taken control of roughly 70% of Gaza, Israeli officials say, pushing the population into a small area along the coast and creating a large civilian-free zone all around them occupied by soldiers. To reach population centers, aid must traverse this territory.
Aid can enter Gaza through one of four border crossings, a senior Israeli military official told the Journal, but the lion's share comes through just two—Zikim in the north and Kerem Shalom in the south.
The most perilous part of the journey is when an aid convoy crosses out of Israeli-held territory, as crowds must come close to Israeli military positions to be first to grab the supplies.
They frequently overtake the aid convoys, swarming the trucks and taking everything they can carry, at times drawing deadly fire from Israeli soldiers.
In the north, Palestinians often go deep inside Israeli-held territory, which the military refers to as a dangerous combat zone and warns them not to enter, to intercept aid convoys a mile or two from the border, according to the WFP.
And in the south, Egyptian officials told the Journal that almost all aid coming from the country is ambushed by criminal gangs almost immediately after it enters through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. Some of it is sold for exorbitant prices at markets, they said. Most is completely unaccounted for.
'Some aid makes it in, yeah…but thieves steal 90% of it and sell it for insane prices," said Mohammed Al-Saafin, a 25-year-old Gazan sheltering in Deir al-Balah. 'Total robbery, but we have no choice," he said.
Currently, there are two distribution channels for aid. One is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, a controversial new initiative backed by Israel and run by private American contractors. The other is a U.N.-led system it was meant to replace.
Israel allowed both to start bringing aid into Gaza in late May. Both have been completely overwhelmed, as hunger was already widespread by then.
Palestinians carrying aid in the central Gaza Strip on Friday.
GHF has four distribution points, three of them in the south, all within areas under Israeli control. That meant Gazans largely have to travel by foot or donkey cart through a militarized zone to get there. Large crowds drawn to the sites have at times come under fire by Israeli soldiers when they were perceived to pose a threat.
Before the blockade, the U.N. had a network of more than 200 distribution sites throughout the Gaza Strip. It has warehouses peppered around dense areas like Deir al-Balah and Gaza City, which it kept regularly stocked with food from its stockpiles kept in Israel's Port of Ashdod, as well as in Jordan and Egypt.
From there, partner organizations would load up and take it to community kitchens or pickup points closer to where people live.
Since the U.N. was allowed to resume aid distribution on May 21, almost none of World Food Program's trucks have reached the warehouses, and its distribution network has collapsed, according to U.N. officials.
Part of the problem is that even when Israel technically allowed the U.N. to start delivering aid again, the military frequently denied its movements. This meant that from May 21, when aid resumed, to July 26, the day before Israel started easing restrictions, there was very little aid entering the Strip and people were largely relying on food stored during the cease-fire.
The U.N. uses a standard protocol in many of the war zones where it operates around the world called the Humanitarian Notification System, according to U.N. officials. In noncombat zones, it notifies armed actors of movements by its agencies and partners so they can avoid harming aid workers. In battle zones, it coordinates with the warring parties to ensure a safe route.
In the period from May 21 and July 26, 53% of U.N. requests to coordinate movements were either denied or impeded by Israeli authorities, according to data provided by the U.N.'s humanitarian agency, OCHA.
During that time, the U.N. said 271 movements were facilitated, which means they were approved and accomplished, while 288 were denied by Israel. Another 99 were canceled by the U.N. or its partners, either because they determined it wasn't safe, were routed on roads known to be impassable or for other prohibitive reasons, OCHA said.
An Israeli military vehicle near the Gaza border recently.
A further 119 movements were in some way impeded by Israel, OCHA said. That could mean that the military caused long delays, detained their staff, changed their route with little notice or hindered them in other ways that kept them from being fully accomplished.
The Israeli military unit charged with humanitarian coordination, called COGAT, didn't respond to a request for comment on the figures. A senior Israeli military official told the Journal recently that delays and denials are made out of necessity to avoid potential conflicts.
Since Sunday, the proportion of requests that are approved has markedly increased, raising questions by aid groups about how Israel is able to facilitate more movements now than it could before, even though conditions on the ground have deteriorated further.
'Aid doesn't reach people because of the chaos," said Nahid Shuhiber, who runs a transportation company that provides trucks for aid agencies inside Gaza. Israel, he said, 'is not interested in creating order."
Write to Feliz Solomon at [e-mail]