Palestinians carry sacks of flour unloaded from a humanitarian aid convoy that had been en route to Gaza City. Photo / The Washington Post
Shortly after 5pm local time on Wednesday, trucks carrying food from the UN World Food Programme passed an Israeli checkpoint and entered the rubble-strewn no-man’s-land of northern Gaza. Immediately, they were overwhelmed.
“Hundreds of thousands” of aid seekers who had been waiting for hours surged to within 100m of the checkpoint, and Israeli troops began to fire rifle and artillery rounds, according to an internal WFP mission security report seen by the Washington Post.
Soon, the UN convoy was overrun. Within three hours, all 47 trucks were ransacked. The convoy had travelled only a few hundred metres.
Israeli military officials confirmed troops fired warning shots to keep the crowd away and said they were not immediately aware of any casualties; a UN official and the security report said more than 50 people were killed and more than 600 people were injured during the mission.
The chaotic scenes on al-Rashid St on Wednesday exemplified the desperation inside the besieged enclave and the challenges facing relief efforts. Even though Israel – under mounting international pressure – last Saturday announced looser restrictions on food entering Gaza, looting, shootings and bureaucratic impediments continue to plague aid delivery efforts almost daily. And despite Israeli promises that it would create secure corridors for aid deliveries this week, UN officials say the operational realities on the ground remain unchanged.
The result, according to humanitarian officials, is that conditions for vulnerable residents who live inside Gaza remain dire – with little of the aid being sent in reaching those who need it most, while injuries and deaths are rising during attempts by the United Nations to distribute food – because Israeli troops open fire to keep swelling crowds away from the convoys and from Israeli checkpoints.
The Gaza Health Ministry has recorded at least 209 deaths among people seeking aid since last Saturday, when Israel announced it would allow more food deliveries into the enclave, in part, Israeli officials said, “to refute the false claim of deliberate starvation in the Gaza Strip”.
The world’s leading body on hunger crises said this week that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in Gaza. At least 154 people have died of malnutrition since the start of the war, the vast majority of them in July, according to local health officials.
“There’s going to be a period of these scenes of mobbing aid convoys until an adequate and consistent level of aid is flowing in,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a US official overseeing humanitarian efforts during the Biden and Obama administrations. “That is an inevitable and unavoidable outcome of the level of deprivation that the Israeli Government has imposed on Gaza through the blockade this spring.”
On Friday, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff visited Gaza to assess the situation.
“This morning I joined @SEPeaceMissions Steve Witkoff for a visit to Gaza to learn the truth about @GHFUpdates aid sites,” Huckabee posted on X. “We received briefings from @IDF and spoke to folks on the ground. GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!”
The 100 million meals delivered so far, however, amount to less than one meal per day per person in Gaza. Many of the products must be cooked and therefore require fuel and water, which are not readily available.
A former Israeli military official, who has knowledge of the operations in Gaza, acknowledged that there was a “total breakdown of order” caused by an Israeli military campaign that dismantled Hamas but never installed an alternative governing body. Criminal gangs are rampantly looting and ordinary civilians believe every aid truck they encounter may be their last, the official said.
UN officials said while some of the looting is being carried out by armed gangs, the vast majority of people hauling food from the trucks are desperately hungry civilians trying to feed their families.
“Without a ceasefire, people are under so much mental stress thinking, ‘This might end soon, this is my one chance to get what I can for my family’,” said the former Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the situation in Gaza. “When Israel says we’re going to let the aid enter now, at this point it’s great PR, but it’s too little, too late.”
Although Israel and other foreign governments announced they would airdrop food beginning on Saturday, the aerial missions do not deliver a volume that changes the humanitarian situation in a significant way, officials say. Another effort, the food distribution centres operated in southern Gaza, has also been marred by chaos and shootings. More than 1000 aid seekers have been killed, including by Israeli gunfire, near the sites since operations began in May, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The UN’s struggle to get its aid into Gaza is particularly concerning because UN agencies long ran the largest food distribution network in the territory. In March, after a temporary ceasefire, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, halting all aid. When Israel came under pressure to lift the siege, it sidelined UN operations in favour of the US-backed GHF, saying that UN aid was being diverted by Hamas – a claim disputed by Western and UN officials.
Today, hundreds of community kitchens and warehouses across Gaza that were once supplied by regular UN convoys have not been allowed by Israel to restart, said a UN official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive, ongoing negotiations with Israel.
Mona Qadoum, a 45-year-old mother of five in Gaza City, said she is surviving on canned lentils she saved from aid packages she received before the Israeli blockade in March. She ran out of flour, which now sells for more than US$10 ($17) for 450g, and oil, which sells for US$25 a bottle. She blamed looters for stealing aid shipments and selling them for exorbitant prices on the market. Two weeks ago, she began to beg for food.
“They say aid trucks have entered Gaza, so why hasn’t any of it been distributed? You tell me,” Qadoum said from her mother-in-law’s home, where she lives after selling her tent to buy food. “Only the looters and thieves have taken anything.”
UN employees and Israeli officials and soldiers who spoke to the Post agree that the situation on al-Rashid St is typical of almost every aid delivery in recent days and weeks. But they offer different reasons for the system’s breakdown.
UN officials say one problem is that they have been refused permission from Israeli officials to use other, less crowded routes; Israel has issued displacement orders for about 80% of Gaza’s territory and marked those areas as closed military zones. As a result, UN convoys can only travel into Gaza through two routes – one in the north and one in the south – that go through crowded areas, UN officials say. And although Israeli authorities have approved more aid trucks since last Saturday, the convoys usually are permitted to depart only late in the day, when huge crowds have already gathered along the known routes, further raising the prospect of looting.
For months, the UN and humanitarian partners have pushed Israeli authorities to open more border crossings. As the crisis worsened, Israel provided UN agencies with written assurances that by the end of June more border crossings would be opened, at least 100 trucks per day would enter Gaza, and no Israeli forces would be present along convoy routes or distribution warehouses, the UN official familiar with ongoing negotiations said. But none of it materialised.
A video taken this week from a UN aid convoy in southern Gaza – and published by the office of the UN humanitarian affairs co-ordinator – shows hundreds of Palestinians crouching along the side of a dusty road as gunfire strafes the ground, close to their feet, keeping them back. It’s not clear whether the shooting comes from Israeli military positions. As the UN cars approach, the shooting pauses and the civilians, mostly teenagers and young men clutching empty sacks and backpacks, immediately swarm the convoy.
Other people involved in transporting aid say that driving along known routes is so dangerous they have to careen at high speeds down crowded, potholed roads. Sometimes, drivers on Gaza’s main artery, Salah al-Din Rd, hit people as they try to veer through a line of looters hurling rocks and firing guns, said Bilal Abu Mugheisab, 35.
Abu Mugheisab works for his family’s trucking and security company, which he said has a subcontract to provide armed escorts for trucks ferrying goods for World Central Kitchen and the United Arab Emirates, among other donors.
“Some people throw themselves in front of the trucks, putting their lives at risk,” Abu Mugheisab said. “People may get run over by these aid trucks. Drivers can’t see a thing, and that’s how accidents happen.” He said it would be safer to drive down another road instead of Salah al-Din, but he had no choice: the other road fell within Israel’s no-go zone.
Israeli officials, in response, say that they cannot easily approve new routes in combat zones. They say the UN, citing humanitarian principles governing neutrality during armed conflicts, has turned down offers from the Israel Defence Forces and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which employs private security forces, to protect its convoys.
“They say the Israeli offer will harm their neutrality, but they’re the ones picking sides and then complaining about the Israeli side,” an Israeli official said.
Still, the proximity of IDF positions to aid convoys means Israeli troops frequently fire toward crowds or other armed groups that are not aligned with Hamas but seek to maintain order, exacerbating the security situation, UN officials and Palestinian witnesses say. It is often difficult to discern between armed members of local clans and Hamas militants, and Israeli troops are routinely instructed to fire on any armed actors who approach aid trucks, the former Israeli military official and an Israeli special forces unit commander said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.
On Monday, two days before the massive mob overran the UN convoy on al-Rashid St, a similar bout of violence took place on the same coastal stretch, just blocks away, according to two witnesses.
Ahmad Maher Abu al-Qarayer, a resident of northern Gaza, said armed local security forces – a combination of people working for the Government, police and local clans – ran into the IDF no-go zone about 6.30pm to arrest a gang of organised looters who had set upon a truck convoy carrying goods from the World Food Programme and even opened fire on them. Moments later, a missile from an Israeli drone struck the security forces, killing more than a half-dozen of their men, Qarayer said.
“In a moment, everything was turned upside down,” recalled Mohamed Tamous, a volunteer with the Gaza civil defence force and a paramedic who was also at the scene. Tamous was shocked, he said, because the Israelis appeared to intentionally target people securing the convoy but allowed people to “storm in and loot the aid”.
In response to questions from the Post, the IDF said it “struck several Hamas terrorists who were waiting for aid trucks to reach northern Gaza in order to loot them”, without providing proof that its targets were Hamas. “Hamas is doing everything in its power to prevent the successful distribution of food in the Gaza Strip,” the military said.
Qarayer, who witnessed the drone strike Monday, said he was “lucky”: the 33-year-old was strong enough to pull 10kg of rice from the trucks amid the carnage and run back home to his six children.
“But some people can’t go to grab any aid,” he said. “There are injured people, children and elderly people.”
Despite the chaos and the danger, Qarayer said he was considering going back soon to wait for another UN convoy on al-Rashid Rd.
“I don’t have any flour. Maybe I’ll go back and try again,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens.”