The U.N. Security Council Reports a Critical Case of Israel’s Denial of Security in the Oct. 7 Atrocity

“We have been calling for more crossings, more opening hours, more capacity to check trucks and pass them through, not have trucks be off and unloaded again four or five times,” said Soeripto from Save the Children. “These are all fairly straightforward ways to make the logistics of this operation much easier, less painful and more effective. None of these have already been taken up.

Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. Security Council said his government was committed to improving access at the Rafah border crossing and reactivating another land crossing at Kerem Shalom in Israel.

Israel said that the lack of aid was due to U.N. inefficiency. Israel has accused a dozen employees of the U.N. agency of being involved in the Oct. 7 attack. The United States was among the donors who were unwilling to give much needed funding because of the claim. The European Commission on Friday said it welcomed an UNRWA investigation into the allegations and was restoring funding.

The UN and non-profits are hoping to send more aid to Gaza, but it is hard to get it in.

The collapse in the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza has produced gut-wrenching outcomes: Children dying of malnourishment, desperately hungry Palestinians rushing aid trucks to feed their families, and on Thursday morning, scores killed trying to access aid from a convoy going into Gaza City.

The U.N.’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, told the U.N. Security Council this week that one-quarter of Gaza’s population, more than 576,000 people, were “one step away from famine,” with 1 in 6 children under the age of 2 suffering from acute malnutrition.

On Thursday, Jordan dropped seven tons of supplies over northern Gaza — the first aid shipment to the area in about a month. There were cardboard boxes containing sanitary napkins, tea, milk and rice on the pallet.

On the airfield on Thursday, photographers were prevented from photographing the flag of another Arab country on one of the pallets; saying it was one of two Arab nations participating in the airdrops that day that did not want their participation publicized. On the tarmac was a Qatari cargo plane that had intended to participate in an airdrop before it developed mechanical problems.

The aid drop on Thursday is part of a dramatic and desperate effort to get food to Gaza’s starving population as Israel allows only a trickle of aid to enter through the country’s sole working land border.

On the tarmac at the King Abdullah II air base near the city of Zarka, more pallets were waiting to be loaded by Jordanian military personnel onto cargo planes for drops later in the day. The meals, similar to military meals-ready-to-eat for a population with little fuel for cooking, featured Arab dishes including mansaf, Jordan’s national dish made of lamb, dried yogurt and rice.

It was impossible to see where the parachute-equipped pallets of food landed over northern Gaza. The carefully planned air drops, conducted with Israeli approval, are still unpredictable. According to Jordan’s military, there was a pallet that got blown across the border into Israel, while most of the others landed in northern Gaza.

The war has slowed the flow of people and goods into the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials said that 1,200 people died in the attack on Israel by Hamas. The Israeli response has killed at least 30,320 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The U.K. foreign secretary said in a statement Friday that it was unacceptable to only half of the trucks crossing into Gaza in February.

She said a Save the Children staffer in Gaza told her that doctors in the maternity ward were sending premature infants home to die due to the lack of incubators. Aid groups say six children have died so far because of lack of food or from being too unwell to eat.

Gaza’s aid delivery system: a last resort for relief to Palestinians there, says Palestinian journalist Ahmed al-Haj Salem

The Israeli military says it needs to search every vehicle for weapons that could be used by Hamas, the Palestinian group that attacked Israel on October 7. Gaza’s health ministry says Israel has killed more than 30,000 civilians in its campaign in the Gaza Strip.

On Friday, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza posted on X (formerly Twitter) that thousands of Palestinians desperate for food gathered at the same spot where civilians were killed on Thursday.

Israel denies that it is blocking aid but aid groups say Israel has presented so many obstacles to deliveries through the Rafah crossing from Egypt that the food shipments have slowed to a trickle.

Salem said the crowd, desperate for food, dispersed when an Israeli tank appeared. But after it retreated they came back and stormed the trucks. He said that when the soldiers opened fire. Israel said it was using tanks to protect the convoy of private contractors in an aid delivery effort it was overseeing.

Like many in Gaza, Salem spends much of his day walking miles trying to find food for his three children, his wife and his mother. For people with money, there’s no food to buy.

With most of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed by Israeli strikes, there is not a lot of ambulance or hospital capacity. Salem, like other casualties, was taken to hospital by horse-drawn cart.

Israel acknowledges that it opened fire in what it said was self-defense but said most of the dead were killed after being run over by the trucks or trampled in a stampede.

“I was standing by a truck when I got hit by a bullet in my leg,” said Ahmed al-Haj Salem, who was being treated at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. I fell and there was a second shot that hit my hand.

Source: Aboard Jordan’s aid airdrop over Gaza, a last resort for relief to Palestinians there

UNDERSTANDING DOWN THE NORTHERNE GAZAZ STRIP: UNLOCKED ELIVERY OF EIGHT AND GRAVITATIONAL FIELD

FLYING OVER NORTHERN GAZA STRIP — Seventeen-thousand feet in the air, Jordanian air force personnel are unhooking the chains to let pallets of wrapped cardboard boxes attached to parachutes roll out the cargo door.

President Biden said that the U.S. would open a maritime corridor and expand delivery by land as part of an effort to combat terrorism.

The routes to take aid in by land rely on a number of factors, such as border crossings, availability of drivers in Gaza to receive the trucks and drive the supplies where they need to go as well as having clearance from the Israeli military for safe passage.

Following Biden’s announcement, the International Rescue Committee issued a statement saying that “airdrops do not and cannot substitute for humanitarian access.” The group also called for “the safe an unimpeded movement of humanitarian aid” to Gaza.

According to a 2021 report by the World Food Program, airdrops, in addition to costing roughly seven times what ground-delivered aid would cost, can deliver aid in smaller amounts than truck convoys, and require a significant amount of ground coordination in the delivery zone.

For one thing, the drop zones need to be designated and cleared — ideally, they’d be open area, no smaller than a soccer field — at least 210 feet by 330 feet.

Another issue: The type of aid being sent. While no one argues that any aid is better than no aid, in a 2016 report written at a time when aid was being airdropped into Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross points out that control of distribution is needed to ensure that people don’t risk their lives from eating the wrong things.

It is important to mention that delivering sudden and without supervision types of food can pose serious risks to life. These risks need to be weighed against delivering nothing by air, or the delay a ground distribution may incur,” it reads.