Middle East crisis: Deaths among Palestinians desperate for food prompt new calls for ceasefire
Since the war began, few aid trucks carrying food have reached the devastated northern Gaza Strip, causing a widespread hunger crisis.
The crisis reached a peak last week after the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, joined UNRWA, the UN agency serving Palestinians in Gaza, in halting aid shipments to the north, citing the overwhelming lawlessness that has taken hold in the area.
Scott Anderson, UNRWA deputy director for Gaza, said the chaos in the north has made it impossible for the organization to ensure aid reaches the right beneficiaries without harming those in need.
“How on earth can you know who got that flour? It’s just not possible,” he said, referring to incidents in which hundreds of trucks swarmed the north. “What we don’t want is for only the people who are younger and stronger to get food.”
UNRWA, short for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Mr. Anderson said, was concerned that the aid could end up in the hands of militants or people seeking to profit at the expense of their fellow residents.
The last time UNRWA tried to bring trucks north was on February 5, but the agency said one came under fire. The most recent delivery to the area was on January 23. Before that, only 93 trucks arrived in January.
While humanitarian groups have warned in recent days that many Palestinians in the north were facing famine, Israel has allowed aid to be dropped in the area and some non-United Nations trucks to enter.
Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion have devastated the north, but also collapsed Hamas’s governance structure, creating anarchy. A small number of police from the Hamas-led security forces have arrived in Gaza City in recent weeks but have largely failed to restore law and order, residents said.
Footage posted on social media in recent months shows dozens of Palestinians surrounding trucks along the Gaza City beach, grabbing bags of flour and running back with them to the city’s residential areas. The trucks usually come from the south and enter the north via the north-south coastal road.
Desperate Palestinians in northern Gaza have turned to plundering the pantries of people who have fled and grinding livestock feed into flour. While makeshift markets offer some food, prices have risen astronomically. A 25-kilogram bag of flour costs $560, more than what many people in Gaza took home as monthly income before the war, Anderson said.
He said a solution to the current crisis would be for Israel to allow trucks from the border area in the north to enter northern Gaza, instead of allowing them to come from the south via the coastal road.
If trucks were brought into Gaza from a new entry point without alerting the public, it would be possible to get the aid to warehouses and distribute it widely. He added that consistently providing assistance thereafter would encourage the public to stop emptying trucks in the middle of the road.
“If we can bring in 100 trucks of flour, that would be enough to flood the market,” he said.