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| Rows of tents are set up for displaced Palestinians in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images) |
| The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip remains catastrophic. Hunger and disease stalk the embattled territory, which has been devastated over 11 months of war. Israel continues to carry out strikes on alleged militant Hamas targets in supposed safe zones, invariably killing civilians caught in the crossfire. And relief organizations trying to help alleviate a desperate situation are still lamenting impediments to aid distribution, and security risks to their workers posed by Israeli troops and a morass of gangs that have emerged out of Gaza’s ruin. Last week, a report by Refugees International, a humanitarian advocacy organization, corroborated evidence of “a severe hunger crisis” in the territory and linked it to the actions of Israeli authorities. It found that the “ebbs and flows in hunger conditions are closely linked to Israeli government restrictions and concessions on aid access, and to the conduct of the Israeli military,” the report’s executive summary noted. It added that international pressure on the Israeli government this spring, following warnings of imminent famine, prompted a “series of Israeli concessions around aid and commercial access.”
But as the war veers toward colder months, humanitarian officials fear a further, deadlier deterioration. I spoke with Corinne Fleischer, regional director for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe at the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP), on the complexity of providing relief in this conflict. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
WorldView: You were recently in Gaza on a mission to the so-called “humanitarian zone” in the territory. What were your impressions of the situation? Corinne Fleischer: When you’re there, you see how the people are crammed in this 11 percent of the Strip, which already was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. You have one makeshift tent after the other at the beach, up to the shore and when waves come, some get washed away. They have to put them back up again. The streets are full of people. And then, when you go to these shelters [operated by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees], you can hardly even pass [through] by walking. So this is how they live, and they’re trying to cope, but there is no normalcy to that. There are no jobs, there is no liquidity. Kids are in the streets and not in schools; they are carrying water. The WFP is supporting about 1.1 million people every month there. But we are now also affected by [Israeli] evacuation orders. We lost 20 of our distribution sites, five of the mobile kitchens. Our last warehouse is not accessible anymore, and we had to relocate our operations center temporarily. We are definitely not where we should be [in terms of access and delivery] for a few reasons. One is it’s become increasingly insecure for humanitarian workers. What are the reasons for that sense of insecurity? We had an incident close to an [Israel Defense Forces] checkpoint where our car got hit by 10 bullets with our people inside. Our people are now afraid. We work in many dangerous places around the world. That’s our job. And people sign up for this because we have procedures in place to deconflict, to manage the security situation with the parties to the conflict. But they don’t work here. On one side, we’re getting shot at, and on the other side, we’re getting looted. Looting is possible because there is no local police anymore. There is no more law and order in Gaza, and that allows gangs to grow and to loot. It’s led to a very complicated operation. You get up in the morning and say, “Okay, do I, go at 6 o’clock to pick up the food at Kerem Shalom [checkpoint]? Or do I go late at night, looking at the ground, whether there are looters there or not?” We’re trying to build alternative roads so that we don’t always take the same road, or at least we’re trying to repair alternate routes that have been damaged. So we need law and order restored, and cease-fire negotiations need to take that into account. For months, we’ve spoken about the prospect of famine in Gaza, even as international powers have pressured Israel to let in more aid. Have fears of a full-blown famine subsided? Some 500,000 people are in extreme levels of hunger — what we call really starving. That’s less than what it was in March when we were very concerned, because we had no access to northern Gaza and Gaza City. Once we had access it improved, but it needs to be maintained at a certain level. We’re actually reaching less people now. We’re bringing in food, maybe about two-thirds of what we need. But then we are not able to distribute it inside. Why is that? Because of the reasons that I just mentioned — the evacuations, losing our [access] points. We wait for green lights [from Israel]. We wait at holding points. We wait at checkpoints. The roads are destroyed; we even have flat tires. It’s a war zone, many people are on the road, so [transporting aid] just takes a lot of time. These procedures need to be streamlined so we can do our work. Given the absence of an imminent cease-fire, what’s your sense of how the crisis may evolve? Gaza City is just flattened, everything will have to be reconstructed. I’ve never seen a crisis like this in my 25 years in humanitarian work. I’m very concerned and a little pessimistic right now, because we can’t do our job. The cease-fire needs to happen. But if there is no cease-fire, at least the rules of engagement need to work for humanitarian operations to be able to deliver — and, right now, they aren’t. | ||||||||