Journalism of Courage
International aid groups were gearing up Friday to funnel as much aid as possible into the Gaza Strip after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire takes hold, but their staff on the ground said they did not yet have a clear picture of what would be allowed in under the deal.
The truce agreement reached Thursday contains stipulations for an increase of aid and the reopening of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza.
Aid delivery is expected to operate on the same terms as it did during a ceasefire in January, when personnel from the Palestinian Authority and the European Union were stationed at the crossing. In the January ceasefire, the deal called for 600 trucks to enter daily.
Gaza is in the grip of a deep humanitarian crisis with widespread hunger, vast destruction of property and most of its 2 million people displaced repeatedly in the past two years of war. The territory was impoverished before the war began, and food supplies and other aid have been sharply curtailed since the conflict began, making things much worse.
“Our teams are ready,” said Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. “We just need the green light to drive those trucks and get them in so our staff can deliver aid directly to people in need.”
Touma said the agency had enough food, medicine and shelter materials in its warehouses to fill 6,000 trucks.
The top UN humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, said Thursday that the United Nations had a plan to scale up delivery of aid over the first 60 days of a ceasefire. He said that almost the entire population of Gaza needed some form of food aid, including 500,000 people who needed treatment to address the effects of famine.
A second UN agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said in a statement that it had more than 180,000 tons of assistance “already moving,” including shelter, food and medicine, with more in the pipeline.
“This is the moment to deliver aid at the scale needed — to reach every family in dire need,” the agency said. “We are ready to save lives.”
Fletcher said the United Nations would aim to send hundreds of truck into Gaza every day to provide food for Palestinians. The United Nations would support bakeries, community kitchens, fishermen and herders.
It would also give cash to 200,000 families to cover basic food needs, Fletcher said. Supplies of dense, high-energy food items would be given to vulnerable groups, including pregnant women, children and adolescents, he added.
The United Nations will also greatly increase efforts to provide shelter, giving priority to the displaced.
Beyond delivering food and essential aid, the UN’s plan envisions restoring Gaza’s devastated health system, Fletcher said. The plan would help establish more health care sites and dispatch emergency medical teams to Gaza.
Most of Gaza has been reduced to rubble and basic municipal services like clean water, functioning sewage systems and garbage pickups are in shambles. Fletcher said the United Nations would help repair and restore these services. Educational spaces would also be opened for about 700,000 children in Gaza, he added.
In addition to Israeli restrictions that have hampered aid delivery throughout the war, the fighting in Gaza has also made it difficult for aid workers to operate. Fuel shortages have been another obstacle.
In New York, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that addressing Gaza’s dire needs would require “full, safe and sustained access for humanitarian workers; the removal of red tape and impediments; and the rebuilding of shattered infrastructure.”
“We can scale up food, water, medical and shelter assistance at once,” he said. “But to turn this ceasefire into real progress, we need more than the silencing of the guns.”
Humanitarian aid has been one of the most bitter flash points of the war in Gaza.
Last month, a UN commission said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, and the month before that a UN-backed panel of food experts said parts of Gaza were officially under famine. Israel rejected both findings and took issue with the methodology used in the famine study.
Israeli officials have said they allowed enough food into the territory, but argue that much of it had been stolen by Hamas after it entered Gaza or aid agencies struggled to distribute it.
But since the start of the war, aid groups have accused Israel of imposing onerous rules and restrictions on what items can enter Gaza.
The food shortages in Gaza worsened with the introduction in May of a new Israeli-backed and American-run system to distribute aid to the territory. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation operated only four distribution hubs in all of the enclave; the UN.-run system that it largely replaced had hundreds of distribution points.
The United Nations said hundreds of Palestinians had been killed near the distribution sites set up under the new system. Witnesses have said that some of them were killed by Israeli soldiers stationed around the periphery of the aid hubs.
Israel said on some of those occasions that it had opened fire to control crowds.
