The World Food Programme’s first delivery of aid to northern Gaza: A reminder for the future of access to the Gaza Land over Land? – Abeer Etefa
The World Food Programme was able to deliver aid to northern Gaza for the first time in three weeks with the help of an Israeli military road.
Abeer Etefa said that the aid from the northern convoy was distributed quickly and close to the fence to avoid crowds jumping on trucks to grab supplies. The convoy included one truck full of flour and five carrying food packages. The delivery came after six days of intensive negotiations, she said.
“The significance of this is that it revives the hope of continued access to northern Gaza over land,” Ms. Etefa said. “It’s a good step, but we just hope that it doesn’t end up being a one-off.”
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The Palestinian crisis in Gaza: The U.N. Security Council’s response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Gaza
President Biden announced last week that the military would build a floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza as his administration grew frustrated that the Israeli government wouldn’t allow humanitarian relief to reach the population. But the pier won’t be ready for several weeks.
One major issue is that Israel doesn’t allow aid agencies to purchase any goods within Israel or the occupied West Bank or to import them through Israeli ports, as part of its post-Oct. 7 policy to cut off Gaza.
The aid will be unloaded onto smaller boats and taken to the network of 64 kitchens once the jetty is built.
There is a security problem in the Gaza area where people are desperate for food and the strongest can usually get it.
Speaking to the U.N. Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the humanitarian crisis is “man-made, and when we look for alternative ways of providing support by sea, by air, we have to remind that we have to do it because the natural way of providing support through roads is being closed.”
“We have to use the same words for what is happening in Gaza as we did for what happened in Ukranian,” 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 UN estimates as many as 300,000 people remain in Gaza, with few to no access to food and water and barely functioning hospitals.
Gaza has 2.3 million people and the war has left most of them homeless. The U.N. quotes Gaza health officials that at least 23 children have already perished from lack of food.
Abed Amin, a 35-year-old who lives in Gaza City and takes care of his three sisters, says he and his family have not received any aid since the start of the war over five months ago. He may borrow money from his friends to buy 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 Khoudary, a mother of four daughters in northern Gaza, says before the war she spoiled her children and made whatever they wanted for dinner. Now, she has had to teach her daughters to survive on one loaf of bread a day.
Recently, an airdropped package landed on the roof of her two-story home. He was thrilled to find boxes of food. She saw a large crowd of people behind her, some of them holding knives, and some were even armed.
“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. McGoldrick doesn’t think that the insecurity would be there.
McGoldrick questioned how we were relying on feeding 1.5 million people through one gate when there were disruptions to that gate. He says Israel should open the Ashdod border crossing.
Israel has blamed delays on U.N. agencies. The U.N. has said Israeli forces have not just delayed approval for truck convoys, but turned away key aid to northern Gaza and attacked its staff and facilities.
“The fact that they’ve had to do airdrops shows that we are succeeding,” said Debby Sharon, one of the organizers for the protest at Nitzana crossing on the Egypt-Israel border, where all the trucks heading to Gaza stop for Israeli inspection. The sit-in that day earlier this month prevented any trucks from getting inspected.
The problem of aid distribution in Gaza is the fault of Israel’s foreign ministry, says a Gisha spoke at a Gaza non-governmental organization
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 claims that Israel stopped renewing visas for humanitarian workers in February.
Miriam Marmur, the director of public advocacy at Gisha, an Israeli nonprofit organization that monitors the rights of Palestinians with a focus on Gaza, says there are several factors in current Israeli policy that directly affect the flow of aid.
Aid agencies in the area used to source goods through Israel, before Oct. 7. 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 is imposed by Israel and affects all aspects of humanitarian operations, including communication.
They need to allow unfettered access for the humanitarians. We have many deconfliction issues and that’s not happening often enough. “We have many issues that have been notified in advance. At the same time, we get blocked or we get diverted or maintained. We’ve seen some trucks being actually hit by military fire as well.”
The UN humanitarian coordination sub-office in Gaza is headed by Georgios Petropoulos who describes what he saw as “profoundly grotesque.”
I could see how bad civil defense vehicles were. Medics were cut in half by machine gun fire. It was that the war of aggression and violence was contained in the area that I saw health care centers shut down.
“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.”
World Central Kitchen plans to use its existing distribution network and to increase to about 100 the number of kitchens it is operating in Gaza to prepare and distribute meals. Andrés says so far the aid organization has provided more than 35 million meals there.
The amount of aid allowed into Gaza last month by the United Kingdom was less than in January, and that Israel’s allies were losing patience with the crisis, according to the country’s foreign secretary.
The US is pushing Israel to allow in aid by land, but they are also planning to set up a floating dock to deliver aid by sea. The project is going to take several weeks and it will be hard to distribute the aid.
In a desperate effort to save people from death,jordan and other countries have continued to make air drops into Gaza. Last week, Gaza health authorities said five people were killed when a parachute on one of the pallets dropped by a Jordanian partner failed to open.
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.
On the Construction of a Floating Jetty to Assist the Mission to Hamas: Open Arms’ Gaza Mission in July 2001
The Israeli military was accused of deliberately targeting the field hospitals in Gaza by Jordan. 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.
The entire shipment was sealed after the whole box of food was individually scanned in order to make sure it did not have any drugs or weapons in it.
Laura Lanuza, communications director for Open Arms, says it has taken three weeks to deal with regulations, restrictions and logistics after the boat arrived in Cyprus.
“If things go well, we will be able to build a 60-meter jetty that will allow us to start bringing in larger quantities of humanitarian aid,” Andrés says.
Israel destroyed Gaza’s airport during a Palestinian uprising that began in 2001 and since October has further damaged what remained of Gaza’s fishing port.
“The most difficult part, the diplomatic technicalities, already is kind of behind us,” Andrés says. The most difficult part of the project is the construction of a temporary jetty.
While aid groups are scrambling to find alternate ways to deliver aid to Gaza because of Israeli restrictions, they have had to rely on Israeli cooperation to get the aid there.