Twelve weeks into Israel’s campaign to root out Hamas, more than 21,000 people in Gaza have been killed and there’s little relief in sight. Talks in Cairo, and an Egyptian cease-fire proposal, appear to be in early stages, and Hamas says it will not return Israeli hostages until the fighting stops.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting Gaza this week, said the war “isn’t close to finished.”
Hamas and allied fighters attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking 240 more hostage, triggering current hostilities. Before that surprise attack, the U.N. agency for Palestinian affairs says, Israel allowed about 500 trucks carrying food, fuel and commercial supplies into the blockaded enclave each day. The wartime average of 80 to 100 trucks “is not anything close to enough,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the agency, known as UNRWA.
“We are forced to make decisions that no humanitarian should make on who do we give to, when and how much,” she said. “In many cases we are forced to deliver a can of tuna or a bottle of water to a family of six or seven people.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office said this week that delays in delivering aid to Gaza were not Israel’s fault. U.N. agencies are “struggling to distribute aid at the pace that Israel is inspecting it,” spokesman Eylon Levy said Wednesday. “Unfortunately, to date, the U.N. aid mechanism has been woefully unsuccessful because it goes through UNRWA. Aid isn’t reaching the people who need it because Hamas hijacks it and UNRWA covers up for it.”
Touma said the problem was a “combination” of Israeli restrictions on the number of trucks and intensive checks on the goods going in.
About 1.8 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents depend on UNRWA for humanitarian aid, Touma said. Of those, about 1.4 million are sheltering in U.N. facilities. The other 400,000 have set up informal camps nearby.
“With the ongoing bombardments, you cannot deliver aid in a place with a sky full of airstrikes,” she said. “The restrictions imposed on movement across the Gaza Strip … means we are missing people in the north on a regular basis.”
Incidents of desperate Gazans breaking into storage areas or stopping trucks to take food items that they eat on the spot appear to be rising.
Breakdowns in civil order are no surprise to Shawqi Salman. The 39-year-old father of four on Thursday spent his third day in a row at a crowded UNRWA distribution center in Rafah hoping to receive two bags of flour. He went away empty-handed, again.
UNRWA initially gave flour, one of its main aid items, to bakeries. When fuel shortages caused bakeries to close, the agency began distributing it directly to families.
“Unfortunately, goods are scarce in the market, and purchasing anything is nearly impossible,” Salman told The Washington Post. Food, including black-market flour, sells for five or 10 times the prewar price. “What is available comes with exorbitant prices, and we can’t afford much.”
Yasmine Rafiq, 22, has not yet made the trek to Rafah. She’s staying with her family of seven in a tent at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, the only functioning hospital in central Gaza, in an area that the Israel Defense Forces has not yet ordered people to evacuate.
Three times one of her brothers has pushed through the crowd at a distribution center to get a coveted food box with biscuits, sugar, salt, canned beans and mortadella. The family quickly finished it.
“We mostly buy items from the market, but the prices are very high,” Rafiq told The Post. “After waiting four days, we received three bags of flour from UNRWA.”
Gazans with extra food or fuel have tried to fill some of the gaps. A local charity worker said the Emirates Red Crescent was providing his group with twice-weekly donations.
“The small quantities sent to Gaza are not due to a lack of support but rather due to the capacity of the crossings in the Gaza Strip,” the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being inundated with requests for help, told The Post by phone.
His group has focused on assisting Gazans who aren’t in UNRWA facilities. The group uses cars rather then trucks to avoid being stopped on the road while distributing food, medicine, clothing, mattresses and blankets.
The charity relies on a database for distribution, “but the movement of the population every day or every moment increases the burden on us,” he said. “Most of the residents here, whether residents or displaced people, lost everything and left their homes without any clothes or supplies.”
Gazans have crowded into Rafah, but no place in the enclave is safe.
A missile strike on two houses near the Kuwaiti Hospital killed at least 18 people and wounded dozens, hospital director Suhaib al-Hams said. The victims included women and children.
“We received some bodies cut into pieces,” Hams told The Post. “Some of them were identified as internally displaced people who came from the northern regions and Gaza City.”
Ahmed Qanan and his family fled Khan Younis for Rafah this week. On Thursday evening, the 38-year-old prayed and then gathered with his children to chat.
“We were talking about our wishes for a cease-fire so that we could return to our home, but we were surprised by a big explosion in the house next to our house,” he said. Shrapnel hit Qanan in the head and neck, he said.
The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Biden administration is pressing Israel to transition from high-intensity strikes to targeted assaults, but there’s no indication that Israel has changed its approach. “We are expanding the fight in the coming days,” Netanyahu said this week. “This will be a long battle.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to the Middle East next week to discuss the war in Gaza, Israeli media has reported. He is expected to push for a humanitarian pause in the fighting.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, meeting in Cairo on Wednesday, stressed the need for more aid and said they opposed any Israeli attempt to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai region.
They said in a statement that the international community should pressure Israel to agree to an immediate cease-fire and allow more aid into Gaza.
Diaa Rashwan, the chairman of Egypt’s State Information Service, told The Post that the government was proposing to end the conflict in three stages leading to a cease-fire.
The Biden administration has been pushing for the Palestinian Authority, which administers a portion of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to return to run Gaza after the war ends.
Netanyahu has called that idea “a pipe dream” but has not said who he believes should run Gaza after the war. He has said Israel will maintain control of security around Gaza, at least temporarily, and talked about establishing a half-mile-wide buffer zone inside Gaza.
Netanyahu and members of his emergency war cabinet were scheduled Thursday night to take up, for the first time, the topic of Gaza’s postwar governance, but the meeting was postponed.
Reports circulated that Israel had proposed a new hostage exchange, but a senior Hamas official waved the suggestion away.
“Every once in a while they [the Israelis] try to send a new thing, but the stance of the movement until now has not changed,” Basem Naim told The Post from Doha, Qatar. “No negotiations before cessation of hostilities.”
Balousha reported from Amman, Jordan. Dadouch reported from Beirut. Kareem Fahim and Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo and Hajar Harb in London contributed to this report.
