After nearly 22 months of war, the little food that enters Gaza is quickly cornered by hungry crowds risking their lives under fire, looted by criminal gangs, or diverted in the chaos, never reaching those who need it most.
Thanks to a partial pause in bombing recently announced by Israel, under international pressure due to the risk of the population dying of hunger, humanitarian aid has re-entered the besieged territory, but in quantities considered very insufficient by international organizations.
The dramatic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is the consequence of the total blockade on humanitarian aid imposed by Israel from March 2 to May 19.
Every day, AFP correspondents witness dramatic scenes in which desperate crowds rush, often putting their lives at risk, onto vehicles loaded with supplies or onto sites where aid being dropped by air is landing.
On Thursday, in Al Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip, dozens of emaciated Palestinians rushed to the scene, pushing and shoving each other after seeing pallets being thrown from a plane.
“Hunger has driven people to fight each other. They fight with knives,” Amir Zaqot, who went to seek help, told AFP.
To avoid riots, drivers from the World Food Programme (WFP) are instructed to stop and let people serve themselves. To no avail.
“A truck wheel almost crushed my head and I was injured while picking up the sack,” sighs a man, carrying a sack of flour on his head, in the Zikim area of northern Gaza.
“No way to escape”
Mohammad Abu Taha went to a distribution point near Rafah in the south at dawn to queue up and reserve his spot: there were already “thousands waiting, all hungry, for a sack of flour or some rice and lentils.”
“Suddenly, we heard gunshots (...) There was no way to escape. People started running, pushing and falling—children, women, the elderly,” says the 42-year-old. “The scene was tragic: blood everywhere, wounded, dead.”
Nearly 1,400 Palestinians waiting for aid have been killed since May 27 in the Gaza Strip, “the majority” by the Israeli army, the UN denounced on Friday.
Israeli forces deny targeting aid recipients, claiming they are firing “warning shots” when people get too close to their positions.
For months, international organizations have also denounced the repeated obstacles imposed by the Israeli authorities, such as denying border crossing permits, slow customs procedures, and restricting access points and dangerous routes.
On Tuesday in Zikim, “the Israeli military made last-minute changes to WFP’s loading plans, mixing up the shipments and forcing the convoy to leave early without adequate security,” a senior UN official said on condition of anonymity.
In the south, at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, “there are two possible routes to reach our warehouses (located in the center of the Gaza Strip),” explains an NGO official, who also prefers to remain anonymous.
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“Darwinian experiment”
Some aid is looted by gangs — who often attack warehouses directly — and diverted to benefit traders who resell it at exorbitant prices, according to several humanitarian sources and experts.
“It’s a kind of Darwinian experiment where only the strongest survive : the hungriest don’t have the energy to run after a truck, wait for hours in the sun or fight over a sack of flour,” says Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“We are in an ultra-capitalist system, where merchants and corrupt gangs send children to risk their lives at distribution points or to loot. It has become a new profession,” explains Jean-Guy Vataux, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), from Gaza.
These supplies, he says, are then resold to “those who can still afford them” in the markets of Gaza City, where the price of a 25kg sack of flour can exceed $400.
Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of looting UN humanitarian aid, which has transported the bulk of the aid since the start of the war, triggered by the Palestinian terrorist group's attack on Israeli soil in October 2023.
These accusations justified the total blockade imposed on Gaza between March and May, and then the creation, at the end of May, of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private body supported by Israel and the United States, which claims to have since become the main provider of aid, but with which the other organizations refuse to work.
However, it only has four distribution points for more than two million inhabitants, described as a “death trap” by the UN.
“Hamas (...) stole humanitarian aid from the population of Gaza on numerous occasions by firing at Palestinians,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declared again on Monday.
According to senior Israeli military officials quoted by The New York Times on July 26, Hamas has been able to divert some of the aid provided by some organizations, but there is “no evidence” that it regularly steals food from the UN.
Very weakened, Hamas is now composed mainly of “decentralized autonomous cells hiding here and there in a tunnel or a destroyed house,” estimates researcher Muhammad Shehada.
Drug traffic
Humanitarian officials told AFP that during the ceasefire that preceded the March blockade, Gaza police, which includes many Hamas members, were involved in securing humanitarian convoys, but that the current power vacuum was fueling insecurity and looting.
“Agencies, the UN and humanitarian organizations have repeatedly urged the Israeli authorities to facilitate and protect aid convoys and our depots,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s policy officer in Gaza. “These calls have been largely ignored.”
There are even suspicions that the Israeli army equipped criminal networks in its fight against Hamas and allowed them to prosper and loot.
“The real theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been perpetrated by criminal gangs, under the supervision of Israeli forces, and they have been allowed to operate near the Kerem Shalom border crossing,” Jonathan Whittal l, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Palestinian territories, charged at the end of May during a press conference.
According to Israeli and Palestinian media, an armed group called Popular Forces, which brings together members of a Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab, operates in this southern region under Israeli control.
The ECFR describes Abu Shabab as the head of a “criminal gang (...) accused of looting aid trucks” in Gaza. Israeli authorities themselves acknowledged in June that they were supporting and arming Palestinian clans opposed to Hamas, without directly naming the one led by Abu Shabab.
According to Michael Milshtein of the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, several of its members are involved in “all kinds of criminal activities,” including drug trafficking through the Egyptian Sinai.
Other criminal gangs are involved in looting, attacking convoys, beating and kidnapping truck drivers in other areas of the Gaza Strip, such as Khan Younis and the outskirts of Gaza City, says Muhammad Shehada.
