Why it's so hard to get humanitarian aid to Gazans
Famine in Gaza is imminent once again, the UN warns, as aid trucks sit stalled at border crossings
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid sit halted at Gaza's Rafah border, and while aid agencies say much of Gaza is starving, many deliveries remain untouched.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, says that's because organizations shipping aid into the region are at the mercy of Israeli authority.
"Depending on the nature of that shipment, that can take anywhere from days to weeks to sometimes months to be approved," he told As It Happens host Nil Köksal in June.
"Just to bring a shipment from outside of Gaza … there is this thicket of challenges one after another that aid groups have to navigate."
Konyndyk says those challenges can include navigating the security situation at the border, as well as getting additional permissions required to move aid to distribution points.
That's particularly frustrating for people living there given that, in some parts of Gaza, getting to eat even one meal a day "is a privilege," said Ghada Alhaddad, a media officer for Oxfam, another aid group working in the area.
"In north Gaza, many of my colleagues say they go for days without meals because they want to save what they have for the rest of the family — especially if they have children," she said.
In the nine months since Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people and abducted 250 others, 37,900 people in Gaza have been killed during retaliatory Israeli bombardments, according to Gaza's health ministry.
A UN-backed report said 96 per cent of the population are facing profound levels of food insecurity, and Human Rights Watch says Israel is using starvation tactics as a weapon of warfare.
While aid can be delivered by sea and air, land delivery is the most common method. One route is through Rafah from Egypt, which has remained closed since Israel took control of the crossing in May. The other is over the Israeli crossing of Kerem Shalom, where the borders of Gaza, Israel and Egypt meet.
Both border crossings served the south of Gaza until the Erez crossing was reopened for the first time since October to bring additional aid to the north.
Those crossings are lifelines for more than two million people in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Alhaddad, who lives in the central Gaza Strip city of Deir al-Balah, said that while trucks await permission to get inside the strip, fresh products simply spoil in the heat.
Other times, border closings by Israeli authorities, which Alhaddad says happen "sporadically," have intensified an already growing humanitarian disaster.
"We keep asking and we keep calling for the lifting of the siege on the borders into the Gaza Strip and allowing all the aids to get in here," she said.
Israel blames UN
But Israeli authorities dispute what aid groups and even foreign diplomats have said, and insist that there is enough aid to sustain civilians in the enclave.
"There is no problem with the number of aid that comes into Gaza," said Col. Elad Goren of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, (COGAT), a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
He said the blame lies with the UN, and that the organization hasn't worked with Israel to assist in aid distribution.
"We are trying to understand the challenges that they are facing," he said. "We suggested different roads for them to use, and until now they didn't use it."
According to figures released by the Israeli prime minister's office, a little more than 100 aid trucks enter Gaza each day since October.
But a dashboard maintained by UNRWA, the UN's relief agency for Palestinian refugees, shows that, in the month of June — the most recent period for which data is available — about 55 trucks per day were getting through. The UN has said that before the current crisis even started, 500 trucks per day were needed.
Looking ahead
It's not the first time it's been a challenge to get supplies and goods into the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel withdrew its military and dismantled Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005, having occupied it since the Six-Day War in 1967, they maintained a blockade of Gaza's access points by air, land and sea. Human rights groups called that blockade a form of collective punishment in defiance of international law.
"That's hindered so many aspects of people's lives in Gaza, whether it's for travel, for studying, for education, for health reasons," said Alhaddad. "You have to go through very tedious levels of checkpoints."
In late June, the Israeli military announced it would halt military operations in southern Gaza during daytime hours. Even so, hope for aid is still shaky, says Konyndyk, but a "welcome step."
"The challenge now is the breakdown of law and order," he said.
"Aid groups, for a variety of reasons, do not use armed escorts. And so if they're facing risks from criminal gangs, that greatly restricts their movement."
And while Alhaddad said she also welcomes any pause in fighting, receiving aid during the day but hearing the sounds of missiles at night leaves her feeling defeated.
"What is the point of this being imposed during the day, but at night my heart can't stop pounding?" she said.
"That's why we don't want just an aid flow into the Gaza Strip. We need a ceasefire."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Interview with Jeremy Konyndyk produced by Chloe Shantz-Hilkes
