Tag: Riley Sparks

55. Earlier this year, as northern Gaza hurtled towards famine under Israeli bombardment and siege, UN agencies undertook an emergency effort to try to deliver food aid safely to hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of starvation.
57. To secure deliveries, the agencies – including the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN’s aid coordination body, OCHA – turned to the local Palestinian community, which formed emergency committees composed of members of prominent families and tribes, and other volunteers.
59. For a few days in mid-March, the system worked. UN convoys brought significant amounts of food aid into parts of northern Gaza that had been cut off since near the start of the war, without the looting or Israeli attacks and interference that had been impeding humanitarian relief efforts for months. 
61. But then – less than 48 hours after the first successful delivery – an Israeli airstrike on 18 March hit a warehouse used to store aid for the initiative, killing two people working there. Over the next two weeks, in what appears to be a series of targeted strikes on individuals and key distribution points, the Israeli military went on to kill more than 100 Palestinians – those involved in the effort and, in many cases, family members and civilians who just happened to be nearby. 
63. These repeated attacks forced the committees to back out, effectively crippling the plan, which came during a critical period in northern Gaza when children were dying of malnutrition and dehydration on an almost daily basis.

… “Politicising aid is not new, but planning to use aid in the way the Israelis used it in Gaza, and eventually eliminating people – killing them – for organising a successful operation of receiving and distributing aid is something new,” said former UN official Ali Al-Za’tari, who also examined the findings prior to publication. 

“This is unheard of,” repeated Al-Za’tari, who served as UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria between 2016 and 2018 and in other top UN aid roles in Libya, Sudan, and elsewhere during a four-decade career. “I mean, I have not seen anything like this.”