Inside Gaza aid depot: Food waits as Israel and UN trade blame
Food aid waiting to be collected
Yolande Knell reports from Kerem Shalom, Israel for BBC News on 22 June 2024:
Lying in the sun, on the Israel-Gaza border, just miles from starving Palestinian families, there are hundreds of pallets of food – from packets of rice to bunches of bananas. Although for the past week Israel’s military has been observing a daytime pause in fighting on a key stretch of road just beyond the main Kerem Shalom crossing point, humanitarian agencies say they are still struggling to get vital aid into southern Gaza.
They blame growing lawlessness for making it too dangerous to pick up and move goods. “The looting has become quite profound,” says Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza. He estimates that last Tuesday, three-quarters of the goods on board lorries entering from the crossing were stolen. UN officials say the vehicles are systematically attacked and stopped by armed gangs, particularly those smuggling cigarettes, which are sold on the black market in Gaza for exorbitant amounts. Lorries bringing fuel into Gaza have also recently been targeted. As Israel’s military offensive has removed Gaza’s Hamas government, there is no plan for how to fill the power vacuum. There are few police officers left working in the Palestinian territory. It is not clear if organised crime cartels are affiliated to Hamas or Gazan clans.
“Meaningful decisions now have to be taken about what we will do for civil order in Gaza and who will take care of delivering that,” Mr Petropoulos says. On a media tour of Kerem Shalom, the Israeli military body responsible for operating the crossings, Cogat, told journalists it placed no limit on the amount of aid that could go into Gaza. We were shown what was said to be a backlog of more than 1,000 lorryloads of aid, external which had undergone security checks and were awaiting collection from the Gaza side.
“This is largely due to the fact that international organisations have not taken sufficient steps to improve their distribution capacity,” said Cogat spokesman Shimon Freedman. He accused the UN – which is the main supplier of aid in Gaza – of having insufficient lorries, as well as needing “to increase manpower, to extend working hours, to increase storage” and take other “logistical and organisational steps”.
…. …. ….
The UN and relief groups rebut claims that they are understaffed or inefficient, pointing to the difficulties of operating in an active war zone. They say Israeli bombings have damaged their infrastructure and reduced their capacity. “We’ve recruited scores of new staff and hundreds of volunteers to distribute aid. We’ve delivered 28 million meals and six million medical treatments – so [clearly] we can get manpower together,” Sean Carroll, president of American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera) tells me. But he says increased workers do not help when “the war makes the pickup of goods too dangerous, or roads are impassable. When there isn’t enough fuel and there aren’t enough trucks or parts inside Gaza.”