In the midst of intense fighting, there is little relief in sight. Talks in Cairo, and an Egyptian cease-fire proposal, appear to be in early stages, and Hamas officials say they will not return Israeli hostages until the fighting stops.
Earlier this week during a visit to Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war “isn’t close to finished.”
Before the war, Israel allowed in daily about 500 trucks carrying food, fuel and commercial supplies to Gaza, according to the United Nations. The wartime average of 80 to 100 trucks a day “is not anything close to enough,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugee affairs, UNRWA.
“We are forced to make decisions that no humanitarian should make on who do we give to, when and how much,” she said. “In many cases we are forced to deliver a can of tuna or a bottle of water to a family of six or seven people.”
Eylon Levy, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said Wednesday it was not Israel’s fault. The U.N. agencies are “struggling to distribute aid at the pace that Israel is inspecting it,” he said. “Unfortunately, to date, the U.N. aid mechanism has been woefully unsuccessful because it goes through UNRWA. Aid isn’t reaching the people who need it because Hamas hijacks it and UNRWA covers up for it.”
But Touma said that not enough aid was getting in because of a “combination” of Israeli restrictions on the number of trucks and intensive checks on the goods going in.
About 1.8 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents depend on UNRWA for humanitarian aid, Touma said. Of those, about 1.4 million Gazans are sheltering in U.N. facilities, and another 400,000 have set up informal camps in the vicinity.
“With the ongoing bombardments, you cannot deliver aid in a place with a sky full of airstrikes,” she said. “The restrictions imposed on movement across the Gaza Strip,” she said, “means we are missing people in the north on a regular basis.”
“People are starving,” she said. “If we want to prevent famine and if we want to prevent the spread of diseases and outbreaks … then we need to make sure that there is a significant increase in the humanitarian and commercial sector.”
Cases of desperate Gazans breaking into storage areas or stopping trucks to take food items that they eat on the spot are rising, according to anecdotal reports.
Breakdowns in civil order are no surprise to Gazans such as Shawqi Salman, 39, a father of four who on Thursday spent his third day in a row at a crowded UNRWA distribution center in Rafah hoping to receive two bags of flour — only to come away empty-handed, again.
Flour is one of UNRWA’s main aid items. Initially, the agency gave flour to bakeries: after those closed because of fuel shortages, it began distributing it directly to families with at least 11 members.
“Unfortunately, goods are scarce in the market, and purchasing anything is nearly impossible,” Salman told The Washington Post by phone. Food, including black-market flour, sells for five or 10 times the prewar price. “What is available comes with exorbitant prices, and we can’t afford much.”
Yasmine Rafiq, 22, and her family of seven have not yet made the trek to Rafah. Rafiq and her family live in a tent at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, the only functioning hospital in central Gaza, located in an area not yet under evacuation orders.
Three times one of her brothers pushed through a crowd at a nearby distribution center to receive a coveted food box with biscuits, sugar, salt, canned beans and mortadella. Everything was quickly eaten.
“We mostly buy items from the market, but the prices are very high,” Rafiq told The Post on Thursday. “After waiting four days, we received three bags of flour from UNRWA.”
Gazans with a little extra food or fuel try to fill in some of the gaping gaps in aid. A worker with a local charity — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy, as he did not want to be inundated with requests for help — said the Emirates Red Crescent provided his group with twice-weekly donations.
“The small quantities sent to Gaza are not due to a lack of support but rather due to the capacity of the crossings in the Gaza Strip,” the charity worker told The Post by phone.
His group has focused on distributing aid to Gazans not in UNRWA facilities. They distribute food, medicine, clothing, mattresses and blankets and use cars rather than trucks to try to avoid thieves on the road.
The charity has a database it relies on for distribution, “but the movement of the population every day or every moment increases the burden on us,” he said. “Most of the residents here, whether residents or displaced people, lost everything and left their homes without any clothes or supplies.”
Many have been hoping that there would be a cease-fire or some kind of pause in fighting as happened at the end of November, allowing the return of hostages held in Gaza. But since hostilities resumed, and especially over the last week, the fighting has intensified and there has been little visible progress on the diplomatic front.
The Biden administration is pressing Israel to pivot from high-intensity strikes to targeted assaults, but there is no evidence that Israel has lowered its pace. The opposite, in fact. “We are expanding the fight in the coming days,” Netanyahu said earlier this week. “This will be a long battle.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to the Middle East next week to discuss the war in Gaza, according to Israeli media reports, and is likely to push for a humanitarian pause.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi met in Cairo on Wednesday but produced no breakthrough regarding a possible pause in the fighting. The two leaders did stress the need for more aid, while they rejected any Israeli attempt to expel Palestinians in Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai region.
In a statement, Abdullah and Sisi said the international community should pressure Israel to agree to an immediate cease-fire and allow more aid into Gaza.
In Cairo, Diaa Rashwan, the chairman of the State Information Service, told The Post that Egypt was putting forward a proposal to end the conflict that would include three stages, ending with a cease-fire.
As for who would run Gaza after the fighting stops, Rashwan said, “everything related to the Palestinian government is a purely Palestinian issue and is the subject of discussion among all Palestinian parties.”
The Biden administration has been pushing for the Palestinian Authority, which administers a portion of the West Bank, to return to run Gaza after the war ends.
Netanyahu has rejected that idea, calling it “a pipe dream,” though he has not said what entity he believes should run Gaza. He has talked about a half-mile-wide buffer zone inside Gaza and how Israel will maintain security control after the war, at least temporarily.
On Thursday night, Netanyahu and members of the emergency war cabinet were scheduled to take up, for the first time, the topic of Gaza governance after the war.
In response to chatter in the region saying that Israel had proposed a new hostage exchange deal, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official in Doha, Qatar, waved the suggestion away.
He told The Post, “Every once in a while they [the Israelis] try to send a new thing, but the stance of the movement until now has not changed. No negotiations before cessation of hostilities.”
Balousha reported from Amman, Jordan. Dadouch reported from Beirut. Kareem Fahim in Cairo and Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.
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