UN aid coordinator says Israel still restricting relief, despite tepid improvement
Jamie McGoldrick laments rules curbing access to north Gaza, but says recent uptick in deliveries means civilians less desperate to risk danger by swarming trucks
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
There have been slight improvements to Gaza’s ongoing humanitarian crisis in recent days, but significant Israeli obstacles are preventing more dramatic improvements, according to a senior United Nations official.
Israel insists that there are no limits to the amount of inspected aid whose entry into Gaza it’s willing to facilitate and that the UN is failing to keep pace, while Hamas and armed groups divert assistance from civilians.
But the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Gaza and the West Bank, Jamie McGoldrick, said Friday that the maximum number of aid trucks Israel has been allowing in each day are nowhere near enough to support a population that could be facing imminent famine. He also pointed to various IDF restrictions on travel within the enclave that regularly prevent aid convoys from reaching those most in need of assistance in northern Gaza; repetitive IDF inspections of aid that slow its delivery and Israel’s weekly shuttering of the Kerem Shalom goods crossing — on Saturday and half of Friday, for the Sabbath — as reasons that the crisis has spiraled out of control.
Speaking to The Times of Israel hours after returning from his latest trip to Gaza, McGoldrick credited Israel for surging additional trucks into the enclave in recent days while opening up a third north-south route within Gaza for aid trucks, allowing more convoys to reach the north, which a UN-backed report revealed days earlier is facing imminent famine.
Some 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians are believed to be living in this part of the Strip despite IDF directive for civilians to evacuate at the beginning of the war. The area is largely cut off to prevent a Hamas resurgence in zones already cleared by the army. With the center of the humanitarian operation located in the southern Gaza border city of Rafah, where most of the Strip’s two million civilians are sheltering, those in the north have had extremely limited access to aid for months.
A bleak scene in northern Gaza
McGoldrick spent much of his two-day trip in northern Gaza, including the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, seeking to understand the extent of the looming famine and determine how the UN can best address it, amid reports of children dying of starvation.
The UN humanitarian coordinator said there were roughly 20 patients being treated in the children’s ward for various illnesses directly or indirectly tied to malnutrition.
Hospitals in #Gaza are at breaking point.
Doctors at Kamal Adwan, the sole pediatric hospital in the north, are desperately trying to care for not only malnourished children but also those fleeing Al Shifa amid a military operation.
Watch for more first-hand insights. ⬇️
— UN Humanitarian (@UNOCHA) March 22, 2024
“Doctors told stories of children who died in [recent] days because they came in dehydrated, anemic, emaciated or just incapable of swallowing [food or water],” McGoldrick recalled.
He said many of the children were diagnosed with hepatitis A — increasingly common in Gaza due to a lack of clean drinking water.
“I spoke with one mother there who said she hadn’t eaten more than one meal a day in the last week, and she looked pale and tired herself,” he said.
The UN is looking to deliver nutritional supplements, medical equipment and fuel for hospital generators, to keep these medical centers up and running. It is also pushing Israel to allow more fuel and spare parts into Gaza in order to fix and properly operate sewage and water treatment plants to more systematically address the spread of disease.
While a handful of aid convoys — around 10 trucks each — have reached northern Gaza over the past week, McGoldrick said the UN was shooting for at least 40 trucks to bring food there daily, explaining that this will lead to fewer chaotic scenes of desperate civilians dangerously swarming relief deliveries.
Dozens of Palestinians were killed in one such scene in Gaza City on February 29. The IDF opened an investigation into claims that troops fired into the melee, while asserting that most of the victims were trampled to death in the stampede.
The incident sparked massive international uproar and significantly intensified pressure on Israel to ensure that more aid gets into the Strip. The weeks since saw the average daily number of trucks again approach 200 and beyond — according to Israeli and UN figures — after an extended period in which only several dozen trucks were making it into Gaza each day.
The improvement has led to a decrease in looting, McGoldrick said, adding that the UN had made inroads convincing local communities to keep from rushing the aid trucks.
However, he said, the restrictions put in place by Israel allow for a maximum of roughly 250 trucks to get into Gaza each day, not nearly enough to serve a population in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe. Before the war, some 500 trucks entered Gaza each day on average.
No aid on Shabbat?
COGAT, the Israeli civil-military unit that oversees aid going into Gaza, tweeted a photo on Saturday of a parking lot filled with cargo that it had inspected and was waiting to be brought into the Strip.
Ironically, it was posted on the day of the week that Israel closes its sole land crossing into Gaza, Kerem Shalom.
COGAT tweeted Friday that the reason it closes Kerem Shalom on Saturdays is due to an agreement reached with the UN “to allow the UN to collect aid transferred during the week and accumulated due to low logistic capacity.”
McGoldrick flatly rejected the argument, saying that it was closed due to the Jewish day of rest, which begins at sundown Friday. “Why do they close it on Saturday, instead of Monday? Why do they close it for half the day on Friday? It’s because of Shabbat!”
The humanitarian workers distributing the aid are desperate to do so on a daily basis because it’s how they make a living, he maintained, adding that the UN does not need a day — let alone a day and a half — each week to collect accumulated aid.
This aid has all accumulated and is waiting for @UNRWA and other @UN aid orgs to distribute it. This is the equivalent of hundreds of aid trucks—which isn’t being distributed to Gazan civilians.
We remain committed to the transfer of aid to Gaza. pic.twitter.com/mEWpUtOLwx
— COGAT (@cogatonline) March 23, 2024
Snail’s pace delivery
In addition to the limited operation of one of Gaza’s only two operational crossings — Egypt’s Rafah crossing is the other — McGoldrick lamented a convoluted Israeli inspections regime that has slowed down the delivery process.
He highlighted how Gaza aid coming into Israel from Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and by sea through the Ashdod Port is inspected upon entry only to be again inspected at the Kerem Shalom Crossing. “Why does Israel need to inspect the same aid twice?” the UN humanitarian coordinator asked, slamming the Israeli parameters within which the UN must operate as an “underperforming, over-engineered, less efficient system.”
Another factor stalling delivery: The aid is offloaded after inspection before being put back onto separate trucks, McGoldrick said.
COGAT spokesperson Shani Sasson denied McGoldrick’s description, saying that it only conducts security inspections at the Kerem Shalom and Nitzana Crossings and that whatever additional checks conducted at Allenby and Ashdod are quick scans.
The spokesperson stressed that COGAT has been inspecting 44 trucks an hour at both Kerem Shalom and Nitzana and that the holdup is not on the Israeli side.
However, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is frustrated with Israel’s handling of humanitarian aid for Gaza and will likely appoint a coordinator to oversee the effort.
Once finally in Gaza, convoys are routinely delayed and turned back at checkpoints by the IDF, which cites military activity on the roads ahead, McGoldrick said.
Aid truck drivers can only travel six miles per hour if they’re lucky due to the poor condition of the roads that the UN is pressing Israel to repave. A trip from Kerem Shalom to Gaza City, around 40 kilometers (25 miles), routinely takes eight hours or more.
Until earlier this month, there were only two north-south routes available for reaching northern Gaza — a coastal road used by humanitarian agencies and the Salah a-Din road in the middle of the Strip, which has been off-limits to the UN for the last three months.
Israel agreed to open a military road on the eastern side of the enclave for aid agencies, which McGoldrick said has helped ease congestion on the roads.
“But there hasn’t been any time in the last five months where the three roads available to us have been open at the same time,” he maintained.
As for securing the convoys, McGoldrick said private contractors are used for some of the shipments, possibly the commercial ones. The UN used to work with Hamas and PA-linked police but stopped doing so earlier this year after Israel warned against it and began targeting those officers. Instead, the UN relies on community leaders and local NGOs, adding there’s been less of a need for more substantial security, as conditions on the ground have slightly improved.
Whatever progress has been made will be completely rolled back if Israel moves forward with plans to launch a major offensive in Rafah to dismantle the remaining Hamas battalions there, the senior UN official warned.
“There’s a coin being flipped right now, and it’ll either be a ceasefire or a Rafah incursion,” McGoldrick said, as Israeli and Hamas negotiating teams were in Qatar for the latest round of talks to secure a truce of at least six weeks as part of a deal to release hostages.
An incursion into the southern Gaza city would disrupt the flow of aid coming in, given that it would likely force the partial or full closure of the Rafah Crossing from Egypt, while the continued operation of the nearby Kerem Shalom Crossing would also be in jeopardy. Warehouses are currently only stocked with two to three days’ worth of assistance, so aid agencies are unable to plan for extended closures of crossings, McGoldrick said.
Another mass displacement of Gazans would also lead to major congestion on the roads, making it harder to deliver aid.
A ‘joint failure’
McGoldrick arrived in the region on an interim basis in December after Israel canceled the visa of his predecessor Lynn Hastings over what then-foreign minister Eli Cohen said was her failure to sufficiently condemn Hamas.
The veteran UN diplomat is no stranger to the job, though, having filled it from 2018 to 2020.
While he didn’t shy away from criticizing specific Israeli policies with which he disagreed, McGoldrick was careful to only speak to the substance of his work and avoided taking more general swipes at Jerusalem.
“I’m not a political person, I’m not [going to accuse them] of violating human rights. That’s not my job. My job is the humanitarian response, so I deal with the Israelis in a very pragmatic way about operations… Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but I have a solid relationship with them,” he maintained.
COGAT’s Sasson said, “Our interest is getting as much aid into Gaza as possible, and we’ll work with whoever we can in order to do this.”
But the coordinator pointed to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification from earlier this month that warned of imminent famine in north Gaza and potential catastrophic hunger across the Strip as a sign of how far behind the humanitarian operation had fallen.
“The IPC rating is a marker of how successful we’ve been,” McGoldrick said. “This is a failure for all of us because it’s a joint responsibility.”
