With constraints on delivery, aid trickling into Gaza too slowly, say humanitarian agencies

Fourteen trucks of aid supplied with food, water and medicines were delivered on Sunday evening to the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza, media spokesperson Mohamed Abou Masbah told Mada Masr.

Sunday’s delivery is only the second to reach the besieged coastal enclave after a first convoy of 20 trucks reached Gaza on Saturday. 

Humanitarian workers and the strip’s government say that the quantities are nowhere near enough. Israel has cut Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians off from all food, water, medicine and fuel for more than two weeks and subjected them to continuous airstrikes since it launched its ongoing assault on the strip in retaliation for the unprecedented Hamas offensive of October 7. 

Though multiple countries have delivered aid to Egypt’s Arish International Airport, including Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, most of it is still waiting to be delivered to the besieged strip. 

Deliveries have been slowed by airstrikes on the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza at Rafah, as well as by a set of restrictive conditions Israel has placed on aid deliveries that have prevented any fuel from reaching the strip. Deliveries to northern Gaza, where some of the strip’s largest health facilities are located, are completely prohibited by Israel.

Even those supplies that have reached Gaza are slow to do so. The 20 trucks which passed into the strip on Saturday, went via the Rafah border crossing facilities. But though there are not more than 200 meters separating Egypt and Gaza at the Rafah border crossing, the second delivery took a much longer route, with nine hours between its departure from Egypt and its arrival to Palestine.

A new screening device was installed at the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing facility and used for the first time by Egyptian authorities for Sunday’s aid delivery, an eyewitness at the Rafah border told Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.

The trucks then traveled southward via the international road adjacent to the border to the Awga-Nitzana border crossing with Israel, around 45 km south of the Rafah crossing. They passed through the crossing facilities at Awga to the Israeli terminal, Nitzana, were inspected by Israeli forces and passed through another set of screening devices, before returning to Rafah on the same road.

Israel’s government noted on Sunday evening that “at the request of the American administration” it had allowed aid deliveries to the strip, ensuring that the aid was first, “inspected by Israeli security officials.”

Another 20 trucks passed through Egypt’s facilities at Rafah on Monday bound for the Awga-Nitzana crossing, according to an eyewitness at Rafah who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity. At the time of writing, however, the third aid convoy was yet to reach the strip.

Distribution also takes some time once supplies are delivered. Palestinian Red Crescent spokesperson Mohamed Fityani told Mada Masr that the UNRWA, to which the Red Crescent delivered the trucks, might begin distributing the supplies that have arrived so far on Monday, but noted that there are strict rules for prioritizing supply that constrain how distribution takes place.

Inside the 34 trucks-worth of aid delivered Saturday and Sunday were supplies of drinking water, canned food, medicines and blankets, said Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East.

But they contained no fuel, as UNRWA Communications Director Juliette Touma told the press.

One of Israel’s conditions for aid deliveries is that no fuel be delivered to the strip, even as UNRWA states that reserves in the enclave are enough to last only three or four days.

Ahmed Mhanna, the director of Awda Hospital in the city of Jabaliya in northern Gaza, told Mada Masr that the hospital has had no electricity from the grid for 19 days, preceding the outbreak of war. As a result, the Awda Hospital gets only 12 hours of electricity per day via a fuel-powered generator. Mhanna said they are already making choices about which operations to conduct for the hospital’s patients. 

Without fuel “all ventilators, incubators, and medical devices using electricity are at risk of stopping,” head of the foreign relations department of the international cooperation department at the Palestinian Health Ministry Mahmoud Radwan told Mada Masr, adding that the fuel shortage also means that bakeries and water desalination stations are to function.

The quantity of water delivered so far is also completely insufficient to meet a fast-escalating water crisis. UNICEF said that the 44,000 bottles of drinking water it provided in the first convoy were only enough for 22,000 people for just one day.

“This first, limited water will save lives,  said UNICEF’s executive director Catherine Russell, “but the needs are immediate and immense —  not just for water, but for food, fuel, medicine, and essential goods and services.” 

Without a consistent inflow of humanitarian supplies, “we face the real threat of life-threatening disease outbreaks,” said Russell.

As for the medical supplies delivered, Ghada al-Bahnasawy, head of media for the presidential rural development initiative, Hayah Karima, told Mada Masr that when they learned that only 20 trucks would be allowed in initially they prioritized medicines. “We learned that hospitals in the country are short of anesthesia and antibiotics,” she said.

None of these supplies will be delivered to northern Gaza, to which Israel has forbidden deliveries and from which it has instructed hospitals and residents to evacuate as it launches intensive airstrikes on the area. 

Mhanna said that his hospital is not expecting any aid to arrive and that roads leading between north and south Gaza are exposed to frequent airstrikes which obstruct the passage of supplies.

The head of the Gaza government’s media office, Salama Maarouf,  expressed regret that the UNRWA relocated from northern to southern Gaza on October 15 and that it has not delivered any supplies to the government in Gaza, noting that hundreds of thousands of displaced people in in the north of the enclave are now cut off from aid.

Alrifai, the UNRWA spokesperson, said that the agency wants to be able to operate in all parts of the Gaza Strip, not only in the south. “We need to be able to transfer humanitarian assistance when it is needed, and while a bulk of the displaced are in the south, there are tens of thousands of displaced people who remain in the north and we need to reach them.”

Humanitarian access has to be safe and take place during a ceasefire, Alrifai added, so they do not get caught in the fighting. 

Leaders of the European Union are predicted to call for a “humanitarian pause” in their meeting this week to allow the safe entry of aid, according to draft conclusions reviewed by Reuters, but may change opinion at the last minute in support of Israel's right to defend itself. 

 A vote for a ceasefire at the United Nations Security Council was vetoed by the US last week. 

In its absence, the convoys that have reached Gaza so far, said Alrifai, represent “more of a diplomatic symbol than actual meaningful humanitarian assistance to a level that a crisis of the scope that Gaza is at right now needs.”