Israel-Hamas conflict: ‘We should not be sidetracked by airdrops and flotillas’

Children lay listlessly on beds, some breathing heavily, others sprawled with arms pierced by catheters funnelling intravenous fluid into them when Jamie McGoldrick, the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, visited the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza last Thursday. “In the children’s ward, every bed was taken up by a child who was at a different stage of malnutrition,” says the Scottish-Irish UN official speaking by Zoom from Jerusalem.

Many children are arriving too late to be saved at the hospital, which lacks therapeutic food to treat catastrophic levels of malnutrition. The medical facility is also struggling to absorb patients forced to leave Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City where a big Israeli military operation has shut down the few medical services that had resumed there.

In the Gaza Strip, McGoldrick saw large numbers of people moving south because there was no food in the north, where up to 300,000 people are struggling to survive. In mid-March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification partnership warned that northern Gaza is facing imminent famine and between 12.4-16.5 per cent of children under five there are acutely malnourished. Even if the flow of aid is significantly increased, McGoldrick says the dire humanitarian conditions mean “an awful lot of people would probably not survive anyway”.

Permission for UN aid convoys to go to the north and use all three of the arterial roads inside Gaza has been routinely denied by the Israeli authorities since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, while on several occasions UN convoys and vehicles have been struck by Israeli fire. “We have to make sure that the places where we work and the people who are doing the work are protected,” says McGoldrick. The intermittent supply of aid means that people in northern Gaza are desperate to secure food; the Kuwait and Nabulsi roundabouts have been particularly difficult for trucks to pass without being looted.

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Cogat, the Israeli military unit which oversees aid transfers in Gaza, released a statement on X, formerly Twitter, on March 21st that said “Israel does not block aid from going into Gaza”. It stated that 44 trucks an hour can be processed at the Kerem Shalom and Nitzana crossings which are closed on Saturdays “by agreement with the UN, to allow the UN to collect the aid transferred during the week and accumulated due to low logistics capacity”.

McGoldrick says Cogat’s statement is not true, noting that there are two scanners at Kerem Shalom which each take 20 minutes to scan one truck: “You can’t do 44 trucks an hour, it’s just physically impossible.” He says the UN has requested extended working hours at Kerem Shalom including Friday afternoon and Saturday, as well as floodlights so that trucks can be prepared at night-time for delivery the next morning.

The UN official suggests that Cogat is making inaccurate statements regarding the capacity at the Kerem Shalom crossing to deflect pressure to open other land crossings or streamline the supply line from Jordan. If trucks from Jordan scanned at the Allenby Bridge crossing into the occupied West Bank were not required to be scanned a second time before entering Gaza that would significantly speed up aid delivery. “Right now we’re getting 50 trucks a week [from Jordan],” says McGoldrick. “We should be getting 30 trucks a day, which we did get during the 2014 War.” In response to a request for comment, Cogat said Israel is exploring the possibility of bringing aid via a gate in the security fence located near the northern Gaza Strip.

“We shouldn’t be sidetracked by airdrops and flotillas,” says McGoldrick, noting that the aid ship organised by World Central Kitchen this month only carried 12 truckloads of food and water. McGoldrick says the temporary pier being built by the US should be viewed as supplementary to the land distribution routes into Gaza. He notes that the large and modern Israeli port at Ashdod, which is equipped with scanning facilities, would allow aid to be delivered quickly and transported directly to nearby Gaza.

In the last week, the UN has been able to successfully deliver aid in northern Gaza without security from Israel, whose forces have shot dead Palestinians waiting for aid, or local Gazan police, who were targeted by Israeli strikes. The UN’s contact with community leaders and NGOs, as well as the Palestinian ministry of social development, was key to facilitating the safe passage of this aid to vulnerable groups “who can’t carry 25-kilo bags of flour”, says McGoldrick.

UN agencies delivering aid in Gaza have long faced heavy reporting requirements to demonstrate that aid is not being sequestered by Hamas or other factions, but the level of hunger and conflict means that monitoring and evaluation have not been undertaken at the same level as before the war. “It’s a big ask for us to do monitoring when you can’t feed people — we have to be seen to feed people first,” says McGoldrick. He notes that the airdrops being arranged by foreign governments, at an estimated cost of $200,000 (€185,000) a plane, do not involve any follow-up on the end use in Gaza but adds: “Wherever you drop, somebody will catch it, and eat it, and use it, and survive.”

Despite opposition from the international community, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with a military operation in Rafah where an estimated 1.5 million displaced people have sought refuge. “I can’t understand how they expect us with short notice and no supplies to facilitate or even support 500,000-900,000 people getting shunted from Rafah to somewhere else,” says McGoldrick. Every time he goes to Al Mawasi along the southern Gazan shoreline, more space is taken up by Palestinians who believe there will be an incursion into Rafah. McGoldrick does not view public comments about camps for Gazans in Egypt or even in the Negev desert inside Israel’s borders as “serious planning” — if the Rafah operation were to happen now, the UN is “nowhere near ready.”

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