Humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza has almost ground to a halt in recent days as desperately hungry Palestinians and criminal gangs loot aid trucks before they can reach their destinations.
More than 450 trucks carrying food and medical supplies are lined up at a holding area on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel as aid agencies struggle to enable more than a handful of convoys to travel securely through the besieged strip.
The dire humanitarian situation had already affected law and order, but that worsened after blue-uniformed Palestinian police — nominally distinct from the Hamas militants Israel is battling — stopped operating after months without salaries, and in the face of Israeli air strikes on police stations and cars.
A crucial chokepoint had been the 3km stretch of road that trucks must traverse from Kerem Shalom before being unloaded for further distribution inside Gaza, said Scott Anderson, senior deputy director at the UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, in Gaza.
Only a handful of trucks have managed to safely cross that area in recent days.
“There was a breakdown in law and order over many months, and in the last week, it has boiled over,” he said, speaking from an UNRWA office in southern Gaza. “Because of the scarcity of aid, the situation has morphed over time into criminal elements trying to get to the aid before it reaches our distribution points.”
In four days of near-total disruption on the 3km corridor between Kerem Shalom and the unloading area inside Gaza, UNRWA has nearly emptied its warehouses, making a resumption of aid deliveries crucial.
Dwindling supplies from the warehouses had enabled hot meals to be delivered from central kitchens, along with wheat flour and tinned food to keep at least 1mn people fed, the UN said.
But conditions along that 3km stretch of road were rapidly approaching “Mad Max territory”, said Anderson, an allusion to post-apocalyptic violence in Hollywood movies.
Trucks had been attacked, including with an axe through a window, he added. This week a Jordanian aid truck travelling at night along the border with Egypt was looted and the driver suffered a broken arm.
Even the aid that passes this gauntlet is at risk, according to UN officials. Gangs of young men have jumped the fence into an unloading area, stealing supplies and removing them on donkey carts. Aid leaving the gates of the unloading area, including fresh fruit and vegetables, is also being looted.
Transporting aid from southern Gaza to the north is particularly dangerous. Trucks on the so-called Beach Road are set upon by young men who are able to haul away the 25kg sacks of flour or boxed supplies, leaving older people and women unable to access it.
The World Food Programme said on Tuesday it was suspending aid deliveries to northern Gaza after hungry crowds descended on its trucks, which also faced gunfire.
With humanitarian assistance lagging far behind the needs of a 2.3mn population whose homes had mostly been destroyed, aid convoys had become lucrative targets, said Jamie McGoldrick, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator for the Middle East.
“Lawlessness breeds lawlessness,” he added. “If we were able to secure a regular supply, and people saw trucks coming in all the time, they wouldn’t worry that ‘this may be my only chance to feed my family’.”
An immediate solution would be to step up supplies rapidly so that the incentive to steal them would disappear, McGoldrick said.
“A lot of it goes to the black market. The prices are quite lucrative,” he added. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — if we can’t get more supplies in, we can’t devalue the black market.”
Israel could help ease the situation by allowing more points for aid to cross into Gaza, especially in the north, and creating “the security space” for these deliveries to continue, McGoldrick said.
Until then, the UN hoped to get local community leaders to accompany the deliveries to help them reach their final destinations, he said.
Israeli officials have blamed the UN and other international bodies, holding them responsible for the lack of logistical capacity in the strip.
“When the UN and the Hamas ‘blue police’ want to act, they can act,” Moshe Tetro, a colonel in the Israeli military, told reporters on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Egypt brokered a tentative deal with Israel to let Palestinian police return to work in official cars, without allowing them to wear their uniforms, raising expectations that they could now secure the convoys, said a person briefed on the situation.
The police had been fearful of resuming operations, especially after a February 6 Israeli air strike in which six policemen were killed, according to local health authorities. Witnesses told the Financial Times that Israeli war planes targeted the officers as they were securing the road for an aid truck carrying flour in Khirbat al-Adas in Rafah, southern Gaza.
A UN official said there had been “instances of Israeli strikes and naval fire hitting aid convoys and the security personnel accompanying aid missions in Rafah”.
A person with knowledge of Israeli operations said Israel had targeted some police in Gaza for being members of Hamas’s military wing in an attempt to “disconnect” Hamas from governing the enclave. Israel was also concerned that Hamas was siphoning away aid, they added.
Commercial supplies through the Rafah crossing with Egypt have also been disrupted.
“It’s a very fragile situation — we are living hand to mouth, and the people we are serving are living hand to mouth,” said McGoldrick. “We should have a backstop, and we should have a pipeline that can be kept constant.”
