A surge in aid into Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu promised Joe Biden a week ago has so far failed to materialise, aid workers say, as the US aid chief confirmed that famine was beginning to take hold in parts of the besieged coastal strip.
A key port has not been opened to aid shipments, and a new crossing into northern Gaza has officially opened but UN agencies are not yet allowed to use it, even though they provide the vast majority of food aid for the territory.
The increase in the number of trucks crossing into Gaza claimed by Israel also conflicts with UN records and already appears to be faltering.
“There is a lot less than meets the eye so far,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official in the Biden administration, who is now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy organisation. “Very little has actually changed.”
Israel denies that famine is stalking Gaza, and has for months blamed lack of food, medicine and other basic supplies on Hamas stealing from civilians, or poor logistics by humanitarian groups.
But it is under increasing pressure from allies, particularly the US, over the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
On Thursday Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, promised to “flood Gaza with aid”, comments that underlined the country’s control of what goes into the strip. Humanitarians have been calling for a “flood of aid” to stave off starvation for weeks.
“It is very clear who is responsible for the siege,” said Juliette Touma, the communications director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, which provides most of the food aid into Gaza. “The siege was imposed by the Israeli authorities. It is a political decision, so it can be reversed by another political decision.”
One of Netanyahu’s promises to Biden, to open the Ashdod port north of Gaza as a portal to seaborne humanitarian aid, has not yet been acted on, according to Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat), a defence ministry unit.
An update on humanitarian aid provided by Cogat showed no customs clearance through Ashdod in the week from 4-10 April. Israel’s N12 channel reported that neither the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), nor the Ashdod port authorities had so far received instructions about opening the facility to shipments bound for Gaza.
Israeli officials had also promised for weeks that a crossing point would be opened into northern Gaza, where starvation is most severe. The new site is by the Mediterranean, near Gaza’s As-Siafa village and kibbutz Zikim, in Israel.
On Thursday the first trucks were allowed through, the Israeli military said. But the UN had not yet been allowed to use it, Touma said.
There is also no target completion date for two other initiatives promised by Israeli officials.
One is a coordination centre where aid agency officials and Israeli commanders are supposed to sit together to make sure that aid missions are not bombed like the World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy on 1 April, when seven aid workers were killed. On Tuesday a Unicef aid convoy was also hit by live ammunition, a spokesperson said, though no one was injured.
The other is a new security screening centre where trucks of humanitarian assistance heading for northern Gaza can be inspected by Israeli monitors before crossing over.
Even if new crossings open and aid delivery speeds up, Israel appears to be targeting a flow of 500 trucks a day, the amount needed to supply Gaza before the war, when the strip had a functioning economy and agriculture sector.
Now the economy has collapsed, the war has halted agriculture, and more than 2 million people have endured more than six months of food shortages and malnutrition.
“The call for 500 trucks, with a combination of commercial and humanitarian shipments, is the absolute minimum. Probably what Gaza needs is at least 1,000 trucks a day,” said Unrwa’s Touma.
On Wednesday, Samantha Power, the head of the US humanitarian and development agency USAid, became the first American official to confirm publicly that famine had already got a grip in at least some parts of Gaza.
Power told a congressional committee that her officials had analysed an assessment by food insecurity experts in mid-March that a famine could set in between late March and mid-May, and had found that judgment to be “credible”.
“So famine is already occurring there?” the Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro asked her.
“That is – yes,” she replied.
The independent assessment, known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), used three main criteria: the number of households facing extreme lack of food, the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and the number of adult deaths due to starvation or the combination of disease and starvation. The IPC report in March found two of the three benchmarks had already been reached or exceeded.
In her comments, Power said the third threshold was difficult to access and more data was needed, but USAid expected it to be reached imminently.
Israel has claimed that the daily passage of trucks entering Gaza has surged since the Biden-Netanyahu call on 4 April, with Gallant claiming a peak of 467 on Tuesday. But UN figures show a total of just 212 trucks crossing that day, including all UN, humanitarian and private sector shipments, and a fall to just 141 on Wednesday. There are several possible reasons for the discrepancy. Israel counts trucks crossing into a holding area at the border.
Under a delivery system that predates the current conflict, goods from outside Gaza are screened, then delivered to its entry points, unloaded on the Gaza side of the crossings and then reloaded on to different trucks operating inside the strip.
The UN tallies trucks when they leave that loading zone for the rest of Gaza. Also trucks arriving from Israel are not always full, while Palestinian drivers always pack their vehicles before departing.
Cogat published a picture on X on Thursday, which it said showed the cargoes of 600 aid trucks waiting to be collected on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing. “Do your job,” the tweet said. “The bottlenecks are not on the Israeli side.”
The content of 600 aid trucks is waiting to be collected by the @UN on the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom in a way that prevents the transfer of additional trucks.
— COGAT (@cogatonline) April 11, 2024
We extended crossing hours and scaled up our capacities. @un, Do your job. The bottlenecks are not on the Israeli side. pic.twitter.com/xe0HsfTQEN
US officials say one of the main bottlenecks preventing the distribution of food is the lack of trucks and drivers operating inside Gaza. However, there is also a shortage of willing drivers after aid vehicles have repeatedly come under fire, of which the WCK bombing has been the worst but far from an isolated incident. They also fear attacks by criminals and starving people in Gaza.
Truck owners involved in the food deliveries, mostly Egyptian hauliers, are also reluctant to let their vehicles be used inside Gaza for fear of them being bombed.
The planned coordination centre, whenever it is finished, may not be sufficient to address this fundamental obstacle to delivering food as long as much of Gaza is a free-fire zone, aid workers say.
“What needs to be fixed is guaranteeing and enabling aid operations a safe presence in all the parts of Gaza that needed it, starting with the north,” Konyndyk said. “And that has not changed one iota.
“I think what the World Central Kitchen strike makes really clear is that the problem is not simply a deconfliction failure. The rules of engagement on the frontlines and the battle practices that the IDF is applying make reliable deconfliction almost impossible.”
