NEW YORK - Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Israel’s throttling of aid came into sharper focus Thursday when its military opened fire as desperate Palestinians gathered around food aid trucks in western Gaza City, according to eyewitnesses. This triggered panic and some people were shot while others were plowed by trucks whose drivers tried to flee, eyewitnesses say. At least 112 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more were injured, according to health officials. The IDF said it had fired warning shots to disperse a crowd after seeing that people were being trampled.
A White House readout of a phone call between US President Joe Biden and Qatari Emir Tamim al-Thani on Thursday said both leaders agreed the horrific event underscored “the urgency of bringing negotiations to a close as soon as possible and expanding the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.”
US Senator Chris Murphy said the situation was “a result of the complete breakdown in social order in Gaza, which is spiralling out of control without a massive influx of humanitarian aid and a pause in the fighting.”
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Across the border, Israel’s bombardment edges closer to some two million people hemmed in between the southern Gazan city of Rafah and Egypt’s frontier. Further north, at least six children have died in hospitals in recent days from dehydration and malnutrition, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
On January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
The international community has repeatedly criticized Israel for issuing insufficient permits, and security clearances, for aid trucks to Gaza. There have also been instances where the Israeli military struck food deliveries. Looting by desperate civilians and criminal gangs in some of the hardest hit areas in the north of Gaza has intensified that crisis, bringing UN food deliveries there to a grinding halt.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
“We talked to the heads of international aid organizations that had been working in conflicts worldwide for decades,” the senator added. “They said they’d never seen a more broken system.”
The situation prompted Van Hollen to spearhead US congressional efforts to hold Israel accountable for its handling of humanitarian aid, which he described on the Senate floor earlier this month as a “textbook war crime.”
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
For the full CNN article, visit: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/01/middleeast/gaza-aid-israel-restrictions-investigation-intl-cmd/index.html
