‘A distraction’: Unrwa says Israeli and GHF claims over UN aid delivery are baseless

The United Nations Reliefs and Work Agency (Unrwa) has hit back at a smear campaign launched by Israel and the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) accusing the UN of failing to deliver aid and being responsible for the mass famine underway in Gaza.

In a video placed by the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, a narrator is heard saying: “While Israel cleared hundreds of trucks that crossed into Gaza, the UN refuses to distribute the aid. These trucks stand idle inside Gaza next to growing stockpiles of supplies. This is deliberate sabotage by the UN.”

The video then shows dozens of immobile trucks.

Juliette Touma, director of communications at Unrwa, debunked the claims that trucks were sitting “idle” in Gaza, and aid within the enclave had not been delivered.

“We have 6,000 trucks stuck in Jordan and Egypt full of food and medicines,” Touma told Middle East Eye.

“They have not been given the green light to get into Gaza where people are starving.”

Separately, the GHF chairman, evangelical Christian minister Reverend Johnnie Moore, wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday and to the Under-Secretary General of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Tom Fletcher, on Tuesday, saying he wanted to collaborate with the UN and accused the UN of leaving aid abandoned in Gaza.

In the letter addressed to Guterres, Moore wrote that he wished to collaborate with the UN.

“The time has come to confront, without euphemism or delay, the structural failure of aid delivery in Gaza, and to course-correct decisively,” he wrote.

‘We have 6,000 trucks stuck in Jordan and Egypt full of food and medicines. They have not been given the green light to get into Gaza where people are starving’

– Juliette Touma, Unrwa

Moore said the “crisis was driven by the ability to deliver the food directly to those who need it. The UN’s continued reliance on what it has termed ‘existing infrastructure’ has, in practice enabled the obstruction of aid”.

Moore blamed the failure of food delivery to civilians on the “manipulation of humanitarian flows by bad actors” without identifying who the “bad actors” were.

He called on the UN to work directly with GHF to deliver “food at scale”.

In a letter to Fletcher, he accused the UN of leaving aid sitting around and failing to deliver it.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, also accused OCHA of being a “propaganda machine” against Israel, which he said purposely undercounts aid trucks heading into Gaza.

The campaign comes as mass famine reaches critical levels with two million people on the brink of starvation in the enclave.

‘A distraction to the inaction’

Touma from Unrwa said that aid had been waiting to enter Gaza since 2 March.

On 18 March, Israel abruptly ended the ceasefire that had been in place since 19 January, and has maintained a blockade on the Strip.

Touma said there had to be “political will” for UN teams to enter, and added that the smears against the UN were “nothing new” and were distracting from the real issue: people starving in Gaza.

“Distractions like these will delay actions that are needed. Children and adults are dying of starvation. Because of this scam of a distribution system [GHF], more than 1,000 starving people have been killed.

“It’s time to lift the siege, let aid in and release the hostages. It’s time to allow Unrwa to do its work. There will be irreversible consequences if we do not.”

She advocated returning to the existing infrastructure in place managed by Unrwa. Unrwa has been banned from the occupied West Bank and Gaza since October.

She added that there was “a lot of manipulation of information” and called on media organisations to verify the videos being sent.

“The media gets fixated on information that one side to the conflict is putting out. That’s a distraction from the atrocities including the deliberate starvation of Palestinian people.

“It’s time for the media to verify these videos and geolocate the trucks and whether these videos are from Gaza or not, and when they were actually stationed there.”

Unrwa’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said on Thursday that the mass starvation was “constructed and deliberate”.

In a statement, he said that GHF’s flawed distribution system is not designed to address the humanitarian crisis. 

“It’s serving military and political objectives. It’s cruel as it takes more lives than it saves lives. Israel controls all aspects of humanitarian access, whether outside or within Gaza.”

He also said that airdrops – which Israel had approved – were “the most expensive and inefficient way to deliver aid”.

“It is a distraction to the inaction,” he added.

Starvation

More than 100 humanitarian organisations warned on Wednesday that “mass famine” was spreading in the Gaza Strip after Israel blocked humanitarian aid from entering in early March and has been providing woefully inadequate aid via the controversial GHF since the end of May.

MEE reported on Tuesday that renowned expert on famine, Professor Alex de Waal, accused Israel of “genocidal starvation” of Palestinians in Gaza with its continued deadly siege on the enclave.

‘Because of this scam of a distribution system [GHF], more than 1,000 starving people have been killed’

– Juliette Touma, Unrwa

At least 122 Palestinians, including 80 children, have died of starvation since Israel’s blockade resumed in March, including 15 who died of malnutrition on Monday, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at distribution sites run by the controversial GHF, in place since May and manned by Israeli soldiers and US security contractors. 

De Waal told MEE’s live show on Tuesday that the UN is not in a position to declare famine due to Israel’s obstruction of access to humanitarians and investigators who could gauge the extent of hunger.

However, he said: “It is actually relatively straightforward if you are perpetrating a famine to shut out access to essential information and then say no one has declared famine.

“Concealment of famine is an instrument of those who perpetrate it.”

De Waal added that famine is unfolding in Gaza in “a wholly predicted manner”.

De Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, affiliated with the Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University, and the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.