The deaths of more than 100 people when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid convoy in Gaza was a tragedy that should have been foreseen and could have been prevented, the World Food Programme country director for Palestine has said.
Matthew Hollingworth also said an aid corridor into northern Gaza was needed urgently to prevent a “man-made” famine there after Palestinians were starved of food at terrifying speed and scale.
“To have a situation today with half a million people facing famine in just five months is extraordinary at that scale,” he said. “There’s nowhere else in the world today with this many people at risk of famine. Nowhere. And it’s all man-made.”
The WFP halted food deliveries to north Gaza in late February, despite looming starvation, because Israeli forces had twice shot at desperate Palestinians trying to get food from WFP trucks in the same place, Hollingworth said.
“Sadly, from our perspective, the entire reason why we came to a temporary suspension is because we feared something like that would happen,” he said in an interview at the WFP’s Jerusalem office. “We had been in two situations, over two consecutive days, where shots were fired when people got too close to the military checkpoint and when people rushed the trucks.”
The decision taken on 19 February “was founded on a fear that further beneficiaries would be killed attempting to get assistance directly off the trucks we took in,” he said.
The UN, the EU and witnesses in Gaza say many people rushing to get aid from trucks last Thursday were shot by Israeli forces. Israel’s military says its troops opened fire in self-defence, did not target hungry crowds, and that most of the dead were killed in a crush or run over by panicked drivers.
Hollingworth said the north of the territory would need to be flooded with aid to stabilise the situation. People would only stop risking their lives for aid when they had got several days’ or weeks’ worth of food and knew that an aid pipeline is functioning, he said.
He estimated that would require a daily minimum of 600 tonnes of food aid, or 30 trucks, for 10 days, starting immediately.
The WFP has been in talks with communities in Gaza City and the Israeli military about resuming deliveries safely, although the deaths last week set them back. “I’m still confident we can restart, and we will restart. We have to. People are genuinely facing starvation in Gaza City,” Hollingworth said.
Airdrops of food, which the US has begun as a measure of last resort, cannot deliver enough to prevent a famine in Gaza City. A C-130 Hercules cargo plane can carry less than 5 tonnes of food, or about a quarter of a truckload.
But they will save some lives and help tackle the widespread sense in Gaza City that people there have been abandoned to their fate by the rest of the world.
“Every time they look up in the sky and see a parachute falling down, it’s a reminder that the world hasn’t forgotten. And don’t underestimate how important that is,” Hollingworth said.
At present the WFP feeds about 1.1 million people a month in Gaza, working closely with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine, which also feeds about 1.1 million people.
But only very small portion of food aid shipped into southern Gaza from the Egyptian border has reached the north, where hunger is most extreme, Hollingworth said.
Food aid is dropped into Gaza City on Monday. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
About 300,000 people there have in effect been living off what was in place before Israel launched its operation in Gaza on 7 October in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas.
Five months on, this means supplies of everything edible, including animal feed, have been largely exhausted in Gaza City.
On a late February visit, Hollingworth saw people “cutting grass and picking leaves from trees” to eat, children wasting away from hunger, and adults who said they had not eaten for days so that their children could have a few mouthfuls daily.
Matthew Hollingworth during the interview in East Jerusalem. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/Guardian
One man who came to collect WFP food aid was so weak from hunger that he had to open the box and eat a can of beans to get the strength to carry the rest home. Eerie markets had flip-flops and plastic food containers on sale but not a single edible item.
Hollingworth said the WFP had 550 trucks in El Arish loaded with food and ready to go as soon as there was better access. The number of trucks of aid crossing into Gaza dropped to about 100 a day in February, less than half of January’s levels.
He said aid shipments were being held up by bottlenecks at Israeli checkpoints for aid entering Gaza, security problems in a lawless 4km stretch between the border and Rafah, and the logistical challenges of moving food north on bombed-out streets crowded with refugees and through communities where hunger is also widespread, if less extreme than in the north.
“We have trucks that have been queueing to cross for a week or 10 days, and then they do cross and that can take 24 hours to 48 hours” to go through Israeli checks, he said.
These delays are partly because the cargo goes through six loading and unloading processes. All supplies must be unloaded from Egyptian trucks into “sterile” trucks that only operate in the crossing area, then taken to a checkpoint where the contents are unloaded again for detailed inspection.
People wait for aid trucks to enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Saturday. Photograph: Haitham Imad/EPA
If they pass – and one item rejected by Israeli authorities means a whole truck is sent back – they must be loaded again on to sterile trucks, taken to the Gaza border, unloaded again and reloaded on to trucks that drive inside Gaza.
Once on those trucks, there is a supply corridor to the edge of Rafah where neither the Israeli military nor civilian authorities in Gaza have control.
“It’s a 4km no-man’s-land corridor where there is no security other than the UN and our only security is our ability to try and persuade people not to steal from us,” Hollingworth said. Drivers have been attacked by criminals armed with box cutters, machetes and axes, and some days refuse to travel this short distance.
“It takes seven to 10 days between departing from, let’s say, the port of El Said or the hub in El Arish to actually crossing into Rafah,” he said. Demonstrations by Israelis who oppose aid supplies to Gaza also close the crossing for periods.
The supply lines are further snarled by a lack of supervision of shipments, with two trucks carrying Covid tests recently taking up vital space.
Inside Gaza, the trucks then have to navigate the streets of Rafah, which are so crowded with refugee tents that some are now barely wide enough for a donkey cart, and drive slowly north through communities also desperate for food.
Hollingworth said a crossing into northern Gaza would be the most effective route for direct aid access. But if Israeli public pressure meant the government would not agree to this, a secure corridor inside the Gaza border, leading directly to the north, would be a stopgap measuring make it much easier to deliver aid there.
Ultimately though, Palestinians need the fighting to stop, to allow aid in on a meaningful scale. “The one thing we want to call for more than anything else is a cessation of hostilities. If there’s a ceasefire tomorrow, that’s a gamechanger,” Hollingworth said.
“You can then work in a completely different way … to improve the situation and start rebuilding people’s lives and hope and dignity.”
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