Help groups unload food and other critical supplies in the Gaza Strip, after a blockade of several months which put children at risk of famine. The relief net comes in the middle of increasing pressure on Israel to alleviate suffering among civilians.
However, even the attention of the world leaders is too measured, the help groups working in Gaza say, and have not yet resulted in fairly close tangible supplies and food.
A report supported by the United Nations published earlier this month sounded the alarm on the intensification of hunger and the malnutrition of “acute” children in Gaza. Without intervention, critical food supplies should run out in the coming weeks, “he warned.
Why we wrote this
The first deliveries of humanitarian supplies begin in Gaza after an 11 -week Israeli blockade. For help groups, Western aid to meet a hunger crisis is vital, but has not yet resulted in enough food and supplies.
The report was not new to the Israeli government. Cutting the supplies was part of a deliberate tactic of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to destroy Hamas, which perpetrated the October 2023 attack on Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking more than 250 men, women and children hostage.
Part of the Israel's plan, according to analysts, consists of hungry the fighters of the terrorist group out of the shade by forcing them to use food stored in its tunnel network – and by pressing the group to abandon the hostages. If the Palestinian civilians lack food, the reasoning goes, it could inspire enough anger to foment a popular uprising to reject and overturn Hamas once and for all.
Internationally, pressure rises on Israel in a war in which some 53,000 people in Gaza were killed. This count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The United Kingdom has suspended free trade talks, and several aid groups call for Israeli actions in Gaza a war crime. Canada, France and the United Kingdom have warned “concrete actions” this week if Israel has not stopped its plans for a major invasion and allow humanitarian aid.
However, convictions are no help, groups working to help civilians from Gaza to say. Why, ask them, do they have Western allies – who have influenced Mr. Netanyahu a little – failed to do more humanitarian aid, including for children, who represent almost half of the Gaza population?
“Europe is a very important player in putting pressure on Israel on this subject,” said Mahmoud Alsaqqa, who directs Gaza's food security operations for Oxfam, a British non -governmental organization focused on poverty relief. “We are looking for this pressure.”
Mr. Alsaqqa met a family in Gaza this week which spent six days without “no piece of bread because they cannot afford it, cannot get it – there are no food supplies”. People give priority to children, he says, but some days they cannot have meals even for the youngest members of the family.
The attention of American leaders
In the United States, certain movements to alleviate suffering seem to rise. A resolution at the Congress last week calling for immediate delivery of food and assistance to Gaza was co -produced by all the Democrats in the Senate except. Eighty-six Democratic members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to the Israel Ambassador, at the beginning, can oppose the Bloc of Israel on humanitarian aid, calling “morally badly”.
Although no republican signed in the rebukes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Israel for a partial lifting of the pressure blockade this week. Netanyahu said he had done it because “our best friends in the world, the senators I knew as passionate supporters of Israel,” said concerns.
“We are happy to see that the help starts to flow,” said secretary Rubio.
President Donald Trump, the most influential of Mr. Netanyahu and, until recently, resolved, said that “many people are hungry” in Gaza on the last day of his Middle East tour last week. “And we are going to be taken care of.”
On the ground in Gaza
The words of the world leaders are useful and “necessary”, but it remains to be seen what will come, says Mr. Alsaqqa, who currently lives in the west of Gaza. He is able to eat chickpeas and canned tuna for lunch because he has a job and can pay the 30% of the costs necessary to withdraw the money to buy these goods, he says. “I have the privilege.”
But most people in Gaza are not today. A bag of 55 pounds of flour costs an average of $ 380, according to the report supported by the UN known as the classification platform for the integrated food security phase.
This means that most families find it difficult to afford one meal a day. Community kitchens were a life buoy, but about 80% of them have now closed due to the lack of 11 -week blockade supplies, explains Mr. Alsaqqa.
The help that Israel has recently started to allow to flow should include supplies such as infants, but the number of trucks arriving is “not enough,” he adds. “We have more than 9,000 trucks stuck in Jordan and Egypt [waiting to deliver aid]. This is the problem.
Israel has blocked the aid to Gaza because he says he is siphoned to support Hamas fighters hiding in the tunnels. This is one of the most frequent statements of Israel in its criticism of the humanitarian system not directed by non-manager, explains Chris Newton, principal an early warning group of the International Crisis Group.
However, while Israel has provided “evidence for certain other statements on Hamas, the systematic flight from Hamas has not been shown,” he said. What is clear is that the organized looting occurred while the aid trucks entered Gaza during the fall and winter.
“You will get gangs of armed men who pay for help convoys just inside official border crossings – often in the direct line of Israeli military positions in the areas they controlled and monitored,” said Newton.
A Memo disclosed from the UN reported by the Washington Post concluded that the looting was sustained, at least tacitly, by Israeli security forces because it allows them to say: “Look, the LED aid system cannot be managed inside Gaza”, adds Mr. Newton.
A new humanitarian aid effort
The Trump administration supports a controversial alternative to unreleased aid involving a group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The executive director of the organization, Jake Wood, is a former American sailor who previously co -founded the Rubicon team, a group began in the middle of the Haiti 2010 earthquake and composed largely of American veterans doing rescue work in the event of a disaster.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it was planning to hire private American security companies – which are both led by former soldiers of the American special forces – to protect “secure distribution sites”. This has been criticized as a militarization of aid.
The Israeli army will not be stationed in food distribution centers, but will be present “remotely,” the United States ambassador told Israel Mike Huckabee. In the midst of the concerns that Israel will use facial recognition to filter the assistance beneficiaries – which UNICEF has decried as “monitoring of beneficiaries for intelligence purposes” – Wood declared that he will not share any personally identifiable information on beneficiaries of assistance in Israel.
There are also criticisms that the Gaza humanitarian foundation will not provide enough distribution centers. In response, the group asked to extend the number of secure aid delivery centers. But this is precisely the kind of work in which the excellent humanitarian agencies, says Mr. Newton, “if they are allowed to do their job.”
It is a complex and dangerous work. Last year, the long -awaited Gaza quay of the Biden administration was assailed by difficult seas and injuries to American military staff. It was functional for about 20 days, reports the Washington Post, at an estimated cost of $ 230 million, and it only delivered a fraction of humanitarian aid, according to analysts, which the officials had hoped to provide.
Steve Witkoff, American envoy in the Middle East, told the Security Council that the United States would stop finance the United Nations agencies that did not support the new foundation.
The Israeli government has also expressed support for what he calls “the American humanitarian plan”, which Mr. Wood said he hoped to have operational by the end of the month.
“There is no time to wait for the ideal conditions,” he said in a statement. “We are responsible for acting.”
Anna Mulrine Grobe reported BrusselsAnd the editor Caitlin Babcock contributed Washington reports.
