Journalists bear witness to humanitarian aid being left to rot on the Gazan side of the border because the UN is failing to deliver it to the people of Gaza.
By Rachel Avraham
According to a recent report in Arutz Sheva, Israeli journalist Natali Dadon entered the Gaza Strip over the weekend as part of a special tour organized by the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT). During the visit, Dadon filmed piles of food and essential goods, including baby formula, medications, hygienic products, pasta, and clothing, left out in the sun, some on pallets and others scattered on the ground, without being collected or distributed.
Dadon criticized the UN agencies: “Israel meets all the requirements of international law and transfers aid to Gaza, but the UN just doesn’t coordinate the collection and distribution. While they don’t do their work, the aid rots here in the sun, and families in Israel fight to survive.”
She added, “With my own eyes, I saw the belittlement; you could fill whole wagons with food and medicine. There are huge quantities that could save lives, but in practice, they stay here, unused.”
“I came in here today because I wanted to see with my own eyes what is happening on the ground,” ILTV Executive Editor Maayan Hoffman told Yedioth Achronot. “I am in Gaza, on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing. And what we have here are thousands and thousands of tons of humanitarian aid that is earmarked—that is slated—for the people of Gaza, but it is sitting here in the boiling sun.”
She told Yedioth Achronot that Israel has enabled all of this aid to enter the Gaza Strip in order to help the people of Gaza. However, once it enters the Kerem Shalom crossing, or any of the others, the responsibility for the aid turns over to the international community—namely, the United Nations and the organizations under its auspices, Yedioth Achronot reported. “But still, you can see, the aid is sitting here in the blistering, burning hot sun, getting ruined instead of getting to the people of Gaza,” she said.
In a recent edition of TBN Israel News, Mati Shoshani and Yair Pinto similarly reported that numerous aid trucks pass through Israel to the Gaza Strip each day, yet it is not reaching the people of Gaza for it is either deliberately not being delivered to the people of Gaza by the UN or is being raided by Hamas terrorists, who steal the international humanitarian aid from their own suffering civilians, so that their terrorists can consume it in the tunnels or they can sell it to their own people on the black market at inflated prices, in order to keep the Hamas terrorist organization afloat.
“I’m seeing an endless array of foodstuffs, baby milk, mattresses, winter clothing—just sitting here and rotting under the Gaza sun. Why? Because so-called humanitarian agencies like the UN refuse to distribute it to the people of Gaza,” Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren told Yedioth Achronot.
“What’s true is the UN is in cahoots with Hamas,” he said. “They refuse to distribute food. Nine out of ten UN trucks are looted by armed Gazans. We know that the drivers of the trucks are members of the Hamas union. Hamas knows where the trucks are going to be, what’s on the trucks, to loot them.”
According to the most recently released COGAT data, on August 5 alone, Yedioth Achronot reported:
>> More than 300 trucks entered Gaza
>> 300 trucks of aid were collected and distributed
>> More than 800 packages were delivered from 8 countries
>> Three fuel tankers entered for humanitarian needs
>> 110 aid pallets were airdropped
According to Yedioth Achronot, President Isaac Herzog, during a recent visit to Estonia, called on the international community to stop believing what he described as Hamas’s falsehoods. “In the last two weeks, Israel overhauled the entire humanitarian situation,” Herzog said. “Thirty thousand tons of aid entered Gaza—30 tons by air on August 7th alone, let alone trucks. Almost 800 trucks the UN can distribute and is failing to distribute.”
Photo from DW News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-LjjY275_A
