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Boston Globe
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Aid deliveries begin to reach Gaza after days of delays
Israel's two-month ban on the entry of food and fuel led to widespread hunger in the enclave, which has been devastated by more than a year of war against Palestinian militant group Hamas. Israel justified the ban as an attempt to force Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages. Israeli officials have asserted that Hamas has largely diverted or made money off aid deliveries, a claim disputed by international aid groups. Advertisement Israel conditioned the resumption of assistance on the United Nations signing off on a new mechanism in which they would distribute relief in areas under Israeli security control. The UN and many other aid nonprofits refused, saying it would fundamentally compromise their work. After weeks of rising international pressure, Israel announced Sunday that it would let UN agencies send small amounts of food into the enclave under the old system. But wrangling between Israel and the United Nations further delayed the provision of aid for days. Advertisement OCHA, the UN agency that coordinates humanitarian relief, said Israel had stipulated that the aid trucks take an extremely perilous route through Gaza. UN officials believed that unless the plans were changed, looting was 'highly likely' to ensue, the agency said. A spokesperson for the Israeli military agency that works with the aid agencies -- known as COGAT -- did not respond to a request for comment. During the aid blockade, local bakeries supported by the World Food Program had been forced to shut down. On Thursday, some bakeries in central and southern Gaza resumed production for the first time since April 2, according to Abed Alnasser al-Ajrami, head of the Gaza Bakers Association. The bread in these areas is now being distributed for free by the World Food Program and other UN agencies, al-Ajrami said. But in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza, there were large crowds rushing to collect the bread, raising safety concerns for the bakery workers, he added. Israeli officials have said they hope to set up the new aid system in Gaza, bypassing the United Nations, in the coming days. In a televised news conference Wednesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed once again to escalate the war imminently unless Hamas agreed to Israel's conditions for a cease-fire. Palestinians would be evacuated to a 'sterile zone' that would be 'Hamas-free' in southern Gaza, where humanitarian aid would be provided, he said. 'At the end of the effort, all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israel's security control -- and Hamas will be totally defeated,' Netanyahu said. Advertisement In northern Gaza, attacks by Israeli ground forces damaged Al-Awda Hospital, according to the hospital director, Dr. Mohammad Salha. He said the facility had come under repeated attacks by Israeli tank fire and gunfire since Wednesday without prior warning or coordination. A fire engulfed the central warehouse for medical supplies and spread to outpatient tents run by international humanitarian organizations. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hospital. The facility has been struck more than 20 times during the war. It has now run out of supplies and cannot admit new patients, the director said. While dealing with mass casualties from Israeli strikes, hospitals say their feeding centers are overwhelmed with patients. 'We have nothing at Nasser Hospital,' said Dr. Ahmed al-Farrah, who said his emergency center for malnourished children is at full capacity. Supplies are running out, people are living off scraps, and the situation is catastrophic for babies and pregnant women, he said. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises, has warned that there could be some 71,000 cases of malnourished children between now and March. In addition, nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will need treatment for acute malnutrition in the coming months. Mai Namleh and her 18-month-old son, who live in a tent, are both malnourished. She wanted to wean him off of breastmilk because she barely has any, but she has so little else to give him. She gives him heavily watered-down formula to ration it, and sometimes offers him starch to quiet his hunger screams. 'I try to pass it for milk to stop him screaming,' she said of the formula. Advertisement Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
New York Times
02-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Desperation Grows in Gaza as U.N. Shutters Bakeries
Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh has lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, as the United Nations closes 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food. Before Wednesday, Mr. AbuKresh, 40, said he would leave his tent in a camp for displaced people in northern Gaza at dawn and stand in line for hours at one of the bakeries, waiting for bread for his four children. 'The line was unimaginable, like the Day of Judgment,' Mr. AbuKresh said on Wednesday, the day after the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep the bakeries in Gaza open. But at least it was affordable, compared to the $30 he paid for a bag of pasta that he bought recently to feed his family. The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has prompted violent competition for food and driven up prices. Mr. AbuKresh said he has resorted to selling his children's jewelry and collecting trash to sell to scrounge up enough money just to buy a bit of food. 'To secure a bag of bread for my children, I risk death a hundred times,' he said. As well as the bakery closures, the World Food Program said on Tuesday that it would distribute its last food parcels by Thursday, and that its remaining supplies in Gaza were expected to run out within two weeks. The announcement prompted desperate Gazans to rush to U.N. warehouses this week to haul away heavy bags of flour that were being handed out. The decision to close the bakeries came almost a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid into Gaza, in an attempt to pressure Hamas into accepting a new hostage release deal as cease-fire negotiations have stalled. The aid has not resumed and a fragile two-month truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed two weeks later, when Israel launched new airstrikes on the territory. The bakeries used as much as 300 tons of flour each day, producing enough bread to supply about 70 percent of Gaza's population, Abdel Nasser al-Ajrami, head of the enclave's bakers' association, said in an interview. Five other bakeries in Gaza had already closed last month, he said, when they ran out of supplies. 'Where will people get their food from?' Mr. al-Ajrami said, worrying aloud that Gaza was headed toward an even deeper humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has said the escalating war in Gaza has led to 'unprecedented' need for aid, estimating 91 percent of its population is facing acute food insecurity. Nearly one-third of the bread made at the U.N.-funded bakeries was distributed for free, he said, and much of the rest was sold as packets of pita for as little as 50 cents. 'It was a way to support thousands of Gazans who lost their jobs and a source of income during the war,' Mr. al-Ajrami said, voicing concern that food shortages could lead to unrest. 'This might cause chaos again across Gaza as people would start fighting for a piece of bread. There might be looting again,' he said. For weeks, the United Nations has sounded the alarm that humanitarian aid supplies were dwindling, and that attempts to gain access for aid convoys lined up at the border crossings had failed. It has accused Israel of routinely denying U.N. requests for broader efforts to coordinate humanitarian movement inside the enclave, and has said the Israeli army's no-go zones and evacuation order areas covered more than half of Gaza. COGAT, the Israeli military unit responsible for coordinating aid deliveries to Palestinian territories, said in a social media post on Tuesday that 450,000 tons of assistance was delivered to Gaza during the two-month cease-fire, and less than 30 percent of it was from the United Nations. 'Meaning, when the U.N. say they have 2 weeks worth of aid left in Gaza, there are plenty of other aid organizations and other actors with food aid,' COGAT said. 'Much of the aid was diverted and available on the markets,' it added. 'There is enough food for a long period of time, if Hamas lets the civilians have it.' In a sharp response to Israel, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said aid must be allowed into Gaza immediately and called claims that Gaza had enough food 'ridiculous.' 'W.F.P. doesn't close its bakeries for fun,' he told reporters at the U.N. headquarters in New York. 'If there's no flour, if there's no cooking gas, the bakeries cannot open.' During the cease-fire, 'we saw humanitarian aid flood Gaza,' he said. 'We saw markets come back to life. We saw prices going down. We saw hostages released, we saw Palestinian detainees released. We need to go back to that.' Mr. AbuKresh said his family was living in 'unimaginable circumstances' and barely surviving. 'This is beyond description,' he said. 'We've surrendered to death.'
