Biden envoy: ‘International workers have never seen sanitation situations as in Rafah’

The southern Gaza city of Rafah where roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are currently sheltering “is a miserable place to be from any health related, shelter related standpoint,” the Biden administration’s Gaza humanitarian envoy says.

“The ability to provide basic sanitation is non-existent. International workers have never seen sanitation situations as in Rafah,” David Satterfield says.

“The ability to do more than survival-level feeding — simply averting starvation… is extraordinarily limited. Just because we are averting famine by the collective aid efforts moving in doesn’t mean we’re preventing other problems malnutrition… and mortality among infants and young children,” he adds.

As the effective controlling power in Gaza, the US envoy says Israel has an obligation under international humanitarian law to ensure that civilians in the Strip are cared for.

“The horrific dehumanization of Israelis that took place on October 7 and the ongoing dehumanization of the Israeli hostages every day they’re held cannot be matched by the dehumanization of innocent Palestinian civilians,” Satterfield says.

The US envoy is pressed on Hamas’s historic diversion of aid money for military use and asked whether Gaza will always be reliant on outside aid.

Satterfield suggests the policies that Israel has taken in Gaza have led to the current reality.

“When [then-prime minister] Arik Sharon took his decision on unilateral withdrawal, our council at the time was you’re not going to have a happy result unless you do the opposite of what you’re proposing,” claims the envoy, who was then an official at the State Department, which at the time of the 2005 pullout publicly hailed the move.

“What he proposed was a siege and isolation of Gaza. We said that [what] you need to do is open Gaza to the maximum extent possible to tie it into international, regional and Israeli economic society — provide an alternative vision, provide something other than what comes with desperation,” he says, appearing to reference arguments made at the time in favor of handing over Gaza as part of a bilateral agreement with the Palestinian Authority, the more moderate foil to Hamas. Proponents of this strategy argue this would’ve empowered the PA, rather than Hamas, which ended up being seen as the deliverer of the Israeli withdrawal and ejected the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in a bloody coup two years later.