Aid agencies say they want to provide assistance, but Israel has troubled delays and refusals, schedules and route changes, and sometimes at the very end, making it difficult or impossible to safely retrieve aid for distribution.
Half of the global food programs that were put in place last week to gather assistance from sites owned by global food programs, the agency said Friday.
Even after being approved to load aid, WFP states that “the convoy is usually late” and will take up to 46 hours before final approval to travel along the strip.
Israel has long argued that restrictions are in place to prevent Hamas from stealing food, but an internal US government analysis cited by Reuters has found no evidence of Hamas’ systematic theft of supplies in the past 20 months.
WFP on Friday said it was waiting for 300 trucks of aid to wait within Gaza, and Unrwa said about 6,000 aid trucks in Jordan and Egypt were also waiting for approval.
“We allow the United Nations, including UNRWA and our partners, to operate on a scale without bureaucratic or political hurdles,” UNRWA’s commissioner general Philip Lazarini said in a post on X on Saturday.
Lazarini also denounced Israel for allowing airdrops of foreign aid, calling it “distraction and screen smoke.” As humanitarian agencies warned at the time, previous efforts to air aid last March proved inadequate to feed the population.
Conveying delay
Delayed convoys mean that more desperate people, gathering along known aid delivery routes, are waiting for incoming trucks to intercept. This leads to people ambushing aid trucks, and the agency says it poses a risk to workers.
“During these delays, the crowd of hungry people often gather along transport routes that are expected to be too small, anticipating the arrival of our trucks,” WFP said.
Israeli forces were fired for gathering crowds and the total number of people killed in these separate but regular incidents exceeds 1,000, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Cooperation said Wednesday. The incidents near a distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, supported by the US and Israel, have been particularly violent.
Um Saeed Al-Reefi walked to a distribution site near Rafah on Thursday, talking to the NBC News team on the ground, still carrying an empty bag.
“I just want to give my daughter something. But they attacked us – pepper spray, bullets, gas. I couldn’t breathe. I ran for my life. NBC News has not independently confirmed the account of the attack.
At least 16 people were killed while awaiting assistance in the northwest of Gaza city on Friday, Dr. Halil Al-Dakran, a spokesman for Gaza’s Ministry of Health, told NBC News.
“What we currently lack is safe and sustainable access,” the U.N. Humanitarian Agreement Coordination Office said Friday. “Workers face constant dangers, crossings are unreliable and important items are blocked on a daily basis,” he said.
The distribution of aid in Gaza is not always this shortfall.
Deliveries were sparse last year when aid was being provided through Rafa, which crossed the Egyptian border, but UN agencies, primarily UNRWA, were able to distribute aid without widespread attacks or looting.
Gaza police were also more present and provided security, but the months of the Israeli bombing crippled the police and increased despair among the people.
