Chaos mounts in southern Gaza due to constraints on aid, UN warns of security implications

Aid is so scarce that it is becoming tough to distribute it to the tens of thousands of people gathered in southern Gaza.

Scenes of chaos have broken out at aid warehouses, and a black market has sprung up around aid items being resold, people in southern Gaza told Mada Masr.

“I expect public order to completely break down soon due to the desperate conditions, rendering even limited humanitarian assistance impossible,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres in an extraordinary letter addressed to the Security Council on Wednesday.

With around 80 percent of Gaza’s population displaced by Israel’s over two-month-long onslaught on the strip, Palestinians are increasingly concentrated in Rafah and Khan Younis. Aid organizations have said that the limits Israel has imposed on supplies getting into Gaza, paired with the mounting needs of people crowded into increasingly small areas are making humanitarian efforts all but impossible.

Two separate sources in Rafah and Khan Younis told Mada Masr that dozens of masked individuals armed with knives and sticks stormed the warehouses of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, on Tuesday.

They seized some of the aid supplies, after which the UN agency put a halt on the distribution of aid to citizens. 

A similar incident had taken place previously in Palestinian Rafah, where some displaced individuals seized food and drinking water.

Mada Masr reached out to an UNRWA spokesperson for comment but had not received a response by the time of publishing. 

Sources said that such incidents had become more frequent over recent days amid the worsening food and drinking water shortage faced by residents and displaced people after about two months of Israel’s ongoing aggression on the Gaza Strip and its tight restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid supplies.

Gazan activist Ghadir Akram, stated in posts on the X platform that UNRWA aid is insufficient for the needs of the strip’s residents. "The agency provides a daily food ration of beans and cheese cans for every four individuals, which is enough for one person under normal circumstances," she tweeted.

“The current conditions are making it impossible for meaningful humanitarian operations to be conducted,” Guterres wrote in a letter to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, urging the body to consider the desperate situation in Gaza as an urgent security matter. The UN secretary general invoked Article 99, which allows him to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security,” according to the organization’s charter.  

With relief scarce, residents and displaced people from Khan Younis and Rafah told Mada Masr that food aid items are appearing on the black market and are being sold at inflated prices. A small box of cheese in Khan Younis, once sold for around US$0.5 now costs $2.5, or as high as $3 in Deir al-Balah further to the north. 

Tarek Abu Elwan, a resident of Rafah, said that the price of a 20-liter gallon of drinking water has reached 20 shekels (around $5.40), and residents have to wait for up to seven hours in long queues at the water desalination station to obtain it.

“An even worse situation could unfold, including epidemic diseases and increased pressure for mass displacement into neighboring countries,” said Guterres.

Gaza’s nearly 2.3 million residents have been pushed into the besieged enclave’s southernmost reaches in two waves of displacement. Initially, Occupation forces concentrated their ground operations in northern Gaza, instructing residents to evacuate south. After the short truce between Hamas and Israel, Occupation forces have expanded their onslaught into southern areas.

Now, all of northern Gaza’s hospitals are out of service, leaving around 800,000 people without access to healthcare, the Palestinian Health Ministry said on its official Telegram channel.

Since the end of the seven-day truce, Israel has resumed airstrikes and escalated its ground incursion to target Khan Younis, a city hosting thousands of those displaced in the first weeks of the Occupation's onslaught on Gaza.

Some residents of Khan Younis have been instructed to move to Rafah, Mawasi, Shabora refugee camp and Tal al-Sultan in the southernmost part of Gaza, next to the border with Egypt.

Other Khan Younis residents told Mada Masr that Israeli forces had recently called them, urging them to remain in their homes in the city center. 

Pushing back against the Occupation’s expansion in those areas, fighters for the Qassam Brigades and Al-Quds Brigades, the military wings of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad respectively, are reportedly clashing with Israeli forces on the ground in the north and east of Khan Younis.

On Wednesday, the Occupation’s military announced the killing of a senior sergeant, bringing the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in the past three days to 13 officers and soldiers. The Qassam Brigades released video footage of clashes and battles with Israeli forces infiltrating the Shujaiya neighborhood in central Gaza, showing an Israeli tank and its soldiers engulfed in flames.