The Israel Food Aid net allows you to enter Gaza after almost 22 months of war is seized by the Palestinians risking their lives under fire, caught by gangs or diverted in chaotic circumstances rather than reaching the most in need, according to the United Nations agencies, aid groups and analysts.
After images of malnutrition children stored an international outcry, aid started to be delivered to the territory, but on a scale deemed very insufficient by international organizations.
Every day, AFP The correspondents on the ground see desperate crowds rush to food convoys or the help sites of the falls of the Arab and European air forces.
Thursday, in Al-Zawayda in the center of Gaza, the emaciated Palestinians rushed to palettes parachuted from an airplane, jostling and tearing the packages from each other in a cloud of dust.
“Hunger has pushed people to turn around. AFP.
To avoid disturbances, the drivers of the World Food Program (WFP) were invited to stop before their planned destination and leave people to help themselves. But in vain.
“A truck wheel almost crushed my head and I was injured by recovering the bag,” sighed a man, carrying a bag of flour on his head, in the region of Zikim, in the north of Gaza.
‘Really tragic’
Mohammad Abu Taha went to a distribution site near Rafah to the south at dawn to reach the queue and reserve his place. He said there were already “thousands of attentions, all hungry, for a bag of flour or a little rice and lenses”.
“Suddenly, we heard shots … There was no way to escape. People started running, pushing themselves and growing one another, children, women, the elderly,” said the 42 -year -old man. “The scene was really tragic: blood everywhere, injured, dead.”
Nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip pending help since May 27, the majority of the Israeli army, the UN said on Friday.
The Israeli army denies targeting, insisting that it only draws “warning plans” when people get too close to its positions.
International organizations have condemned for months the restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities on the distribution of assistance in Gaza, in particular by refusing to issue permits of border crossing, a slow customs authorization, limited access points and imposing dangerous routes.
On Tuesday, in Zikim, the Israeli army “changed the loading plans for WFP, mixing freight unexpectedly. The convoy was forced to leave early, without appropriate security,” said a senior United Nations who spoke under the cover of anonymity.
In the south of Gaza, in crossing Kerem Shalom, “there are two possible routes to reach our warehouses [in central Gaza]”Said an official of the NGO, who also preferred to remain anonymous.” One is quite safe, the other is regularly the scene of combat and looting, and that is the one we have forced to take. “
“ Darwinian experience ”
The gangs plunder part of the aid – which often attack warehouses directly – and divert it to merchants who resell it at exorbitant prices, according to several humanitarian sources and experts.
“It becomes this kind of Darwinian social experience in the survival of the most apt,” said Muhammad Shehada, visiting the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“The people who are the most hungry in the world and who do not have energy must run and continue after a truck and wait for hours and hours in the sun and try to build people and compete for a bag of flour,” he said.
Jean Guy Vataux, Emergency Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, added: “We are in an ultra-capitalist system, where traders and corrupt gangs send children to risk life and members to distribution points or during looting. It has become a new profession.”
This food is then sold to “those who can still afford it” in the markets of Gaza City, where the price of a 25 kg flour can exceed $ 400, he added.
“ Never found the proof ”
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of aid looting provided by the UN, which provides most of the aid since the start of the war launched by the attack on the Palestinian group in October 2023.
The Israeli authorities used this accusation to justify the total blockade they imposed on Gaza between March and May, and the subsequent creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organization supported by Israel and the United States, which has become the main aid distributor, the Touche des agencies de l’UU.
However, for more than 2 million inhabitants of Gaza, the GHF has only four distribution points, which the UN describes as a “death trap”.
“Hamas … has repeatedly stolen the help of the Gaza population by pulling on the Palestinians,” the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
But according to senior Israeli military officials mentioned by the New York Times On July 26, Israel “never found evidence” that the group had “systematically stolen aid” in the UN.
Weakened by the war with Israel, which has seen most of its high direction killed, Hamas is now made up of “essentially decentralized autonomous cells,” said Shehada.
The humanitarian workers said AFP That during the ceasefire that preceded the March blockade, the Gaza police – which includes many members of Hamas – helped secure humanitarian convoys, but that the current emptiness favored insecurity and looting.
“United Nations agencies and humanitarian organizations have repeatedly called on Israeli authorities to facilitate and protect convoys of aid and storage sites in our warehouses through the Gaza Strip,” said Bushra Khalidi, politician in Oxfam.
“These calls have been widely ignored,” she added.
“ All kinds of criminal activities ”
The Israeli army is also accused of having equipped Palestinian criminal networks in its fight against Hamas and allowing them to loot help.
“The real flight of aid since the start of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the supervision of Israeli forces, and they were allowed to operate near the cross of Kerem Shalom in Gaza,” said Jonathan Whittall, Palestinian territories.
According to the Israeli and Palestinian media, an armed group called the popular forces, made up of members of a Bedouine tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab, operates in the southern region under Israeli control.
The ECFR describes Abu Shabab as leaders a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah region which is largely accused of looting of aid trucks”.
The Israeli authorities themselves recognized in June that they had armed Palestinian gangs opposed to Hamas, without directly named that led by Abu Shabab.
Michael Mshshtein, head of the Palestinian Study Forum in Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, said many gang members were involved in “all kinds of criminal activities, smuggling drugs and things like that”.
“None of this can happen in Gaza without the tacit approval of the Israeli army,” a humanitarian worker in Gaza said, asking not to be appointed.
