Briefing the Israeli press after Benjamin Netanyahu’s order to turn off the aid supply to Gaza, government officials claimed that the Palestinian territory had several months’ worth of food stockpiled from earlier deliveries. However, the announcement led to an immediate jump in prices of basic necessities in Gaza, with residents saying they had doubled.
Aid agencies say the population of Gaza remains highly vulnerable and that the blockade of humanitarian supplies to a civilian population is unacceptable in any circumstances.
Oxfam said: “Israel’s decision, to block aid to over 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as Ramadan begins, is a reckless act of collective punishment, explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law. The government of Israel, as occupying power, has the responsibility to ensure that humanitarian aid can reach the population in Gaza.”
The international court of justice, weighing an allegation of genocide brought against Israel, has instructed Israel to facilitate aid deliveries to Gaza and its remaining population of 2.2 million. The international criminal court said when it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu last year that there was reason to believe Israel had used “starvation as a method of warfare”.
Israel has consistently denied allegations by aid organisations during the 15-month military campaign in Gaza that it was using food as a weapon of war, insisting that blockages in supplies were a result of other factors. Sunday’s announcement by Netanyahu’s office made no attempt to disguise the government’s actions or the goal behind them, which is to gain advantage at the negotiating table.
For the duration of the ceasefire, about 600 trucks a day have crossed into Gaza, carrying a total of 57,000 tons of food. This is a similar level to prewar aid deliveries, but aid agencies say that was for a population in a much better physical condition than the undernourished inhabitants now, and that also had the capacity to produce some of its own food.
The situation in Gaza now is far more precarious. Nearly 70% of the buildings across the coastal strip have been destroyed or damaged. In those circumstances, Oxfam called the aid that reached Gaza during the six-week ceasefire “a drop in the ocean”.
In its latest report, in late February, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 876,000 Palestinians in Gaza still suffered from emergency levels of food insecurity, and 345,000 were facing catastrophic food insecurity.
Even in the six weeks of the ceasefire, Israel kept tight control of what was allowed in humanitarian shipments. Aid agencies complained that a lot of medical equipment was blocked on the grounds it was “dual use” and that water tankers were also blocked, leaving people dependent on wells, which in the wake of conflict are insufficient for the population’s needs.
There are about 1,500 water access points operating across Gaza, and the UN says water production and supply are at about a quarter of prewar levels.
Health issues remain a primary concern, with an estimated 80% of Gaza’s health infrastructure destroyed by the war and 1,000 medical workers killed. The World Health Organization has estimated there are up to 14,000 Palestinians in Gaza in need of medical evacuation, including 4,500 children.
“The health situation in the Gaza Strip is a catastrophe,” said Amjad al-Shawa, the director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network. He said that in Gaza City alone there was 180,000 tons of solid waste that Israeli authorities had blocked from being removed, with the result that sewage was overflowing. “That has severe health implications in the conditions now in Gaza,” Shawa said.
Kathleen Spencer Chapman, the external affairs director at Plan International UK, said: “Without the influx of humanitarian aid promised by the ceasefire agreement, thousands more could die from hunger and related diseases alone.”
