Only a trickle of aid reaches northern Gaza, while hunger grows

Only a trickle of aid reached the desperately hungry people of the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, where the United Nations has warned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians face a growing threat of famine after nearly five months of fighting and blockades.

According to COGAT, the Israeli military body that regulates aid to the Palestinians, 15 trucks were sent to northern Gaza overnight as part of an aid operation involving Palestinian businessmen. But at least five of them were looted along the way, according to an Israeli official who was not authorized to comment publicly and therefore spoke on condition of anonymity.

It was unclear exactly how many of the trucks reached their intended destination, Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood. Izzat Aqel, a Palestinian businessman involved in the operation, said he planned to send another 30 trucks of food aid to northern Gaza on Monday evening.

Aid officials have warned that Palestinians in Gaza could be on the brink of famine unless aid is significantly increased, with more than 500,000 people already facing severe food shortages. According to the United Nations, one in six children under the age of two in Gaza is acutely malnourished. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said visits to hospitals in the north by agency officials – the first since early October – showed severe malnutrition and “children were dying of hunger.”

The dire conditions have prompted crowds of desperate people to swarm aid trucks and contributed to a bloody scene last week, when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians who had gathered en masse around a convoy of trucks that had entered northern Gaza. More than 100 Palestinians were killed, many by gunfire, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israeli army said its troops shot at crowd members who approached them in a threatening manner, and attributed most of the deaths to a stampede around the convoy.

In the wake of the convoy bloodshed, Israel has faced even greater international pressure to facilitate more aid to Gazans, especially in the north.

“We continue to push hard for more trucks and routes to get more help to people,” President Biden wrote on social media on Monday. “There are no excuses. The aid flowing into Gaza is not nearly enough – and nowhere fast enough.”

On Sunday, the United States dropped food into Gaza for the first time.

Since October, Israel has ordered the population of northern Gaza, home to more than a million people, to flee the fighting and move south. But many stayed even as the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza began, and some who had been evacuated have returned.

The area has been devastated, many buildings have been destroyed, and Israeli forces have effectively overthrown much of Hamas’s governance structure, causing widespread chaos and lawlessness.

All aid trucks entering Gaza have headed south, and only a few continue north.

Despite the widening humanitarian crisis, Israel has maintained strict restrictions on aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli officials have been closely monitoring trucks carrying desperately needed food and aid at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which aid officials have labeled a major chokepoint. Israel says the inspections are necessary to prevent aid from reaching Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that Israel wants to eradicate in Gaza.

A day after Israeli officials said 277 trucks – an unusually large number – had been allowed into Gaza in the past 24 hours, Juliette Touma, communications director for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said 140 aid trucks entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Monday.

The spike in relief arrivals showed that “if there is a political will, there is a way,” she said, but declined to say whether this meant Israel had eased its restrictions. The increase in aid shipments was still far below what was needed to alleviate the disease and hunger that threaten many Gazans, she added.

UN officials have said the current system needs to be overhauled to mitigate the unfolding disaster. Both UNRWA and the World Food Program have suspended operations in northern Gaza, citing both Israel’s refusal to allow convoys and its inability to protect cargoes from seizure by desperate Gazans amid the anarchy.

In talks with their Israeli counterparts, U.N. officials have pushed for Israel to open a border crossing that would allow them to transport aid directly to northern Gaza, avoiding the dangerous southern routes, Jaime McGoldrick, the humanitarian chief, told reporters. of the UN in Jerusalem, to reporters last month. .