Aid organizations fear for the humanitarian situation in Gaza after the Rafah border takeover

NOS News•today, 9:18 PM

In the short term, the outlook is bleak for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing severe hunger in Gaza. The two main emergency aid supply locations have been closed since Israel seized the Rafah crossing today. The crossing at Kerem Shalom, in the southeastern tip of Gaza, was closed on Sunday after a rocket attack by Hamas.

According to the UN, there is already famine in the north of Gaza Aid organizations warn that the humanitarian crisis will worsen further due to the closure of border crossings. “Catastrophic hunger in northern Gaza will become much worse if supply routes are lost,” said UN aid agency UNRWA https://twitter.com/UNRWA/status/1787735777310306656. According to a spokesperson for OCHA, the UN humanitarian agency, this morning was “one of the darkest in this seven-month nightmare”.

Michiel Servaes, director of Oxfam Novib in the Netherlands, also fears the worst. “The border crossings are the lifeline for two million Gazans,” he says. “In a sense we are back to square one. The entire area is closed off and people are once again at the mercy of the things they have left.”

It reminds him of the first weeks after October 7, when Gaza’s borders were completely closed. “But people are already in bad shape. If humanitarian aid is not forthcoming, people will be in acute need.”

Servaes is in close contact with his colleagues in Gaza and hears that the effects are immediately noticeable. “I heard that food prices in the market have increased five times.”

Since the closure of the two main border crossings, only the border crossing at Erez in northern Gaza is still in use. A number of trucks carrying emergency aid arrived there today, says a UN spokesperson, but that is far from enough. Moreover, that emergency aid would not have included fuel.

And that is exactly what is needed. According to OCHA, Gaza only has fuel for one day. The supply of petrol and diesel is crucial to generate electricity for hospitals, for example.

In March, the IPC, the international watchdog for food security, sounded the alarm. According to a forecast, 1.1 million Gazans would face ‘catastrophic food insecurity’ between March 16 and July 15 (phase 5). This is the highest warning level that the IPC can give and means that the food deficiency is such that it could be fatal.

Aid organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Oxfam Novib accuse Israel of using hunger as a weapon.

NOS op 3 previously made this video about hunger in Gaza:

Over the past month, Israel has gradually allowed more emergency aid. OCHA data shows that more medicines, fuel and food have recently entered the closed enclave. Yesterday, for example, more than 340 trucks passed through Gaza border posts. That was still less than the 500 daily freight loads before the war, but considerably more than in the first months of the war.

The UN warned yesterday that this is not nearly enough to prevent famine. In addition, the people who need emergency aid most are not being reached, said the director of the UN organization UNRWA. “When we ask permission for a convoy from the south to the north, it is systematically rejected.”

And with the main border crossings closed, concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza are increasing. On top of that, Gazans fear a broader offensive in Rafah. Yesterday, Israel called on the people of East Rafah to leave the area for Khan Younis or the coastal town of Al-Mawasi, but aid organizations questioned the safety of these ‘humanitarian zones’.

A large number of hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or completely destroyed. 23 hospitals are no longer operational due to material damage or lack of electricity or fuel. The rest are only partially or minimally active.

That is a humanitarian tragedy: aid workers say that Gazans have almost nowhere to go if they are sick, injured or malnourished. Now that the supply of fuel has come to a complete standstill, it is unclear what this will mean for the hospitals that are still (partly) operational.

It is mainly the lack of fuel that worries aid organizations. For example, Servaes says that his colleagues from Oxfam still have fuel for three to four days. “After that, they can no longer move through the area and distributing emergency aid is impossible,” he says. “I don’t know exactly about other aid organizations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have large stocks of fuel either.”