The need for humanitarian aid in Gaza is enormous, but trying to decipher how much aid is getting into the territory and where it’s going can be tricky.
The war between Israel and Hamas has created a spiraling humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
The numbers provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) detail the extent of the misery:
1.7 million people displaced
2.2 million at « imminent risk of famine »
Over 60% of housing in Gaza damaged
Roughly 17,000 children unaccompanied or separated from their parents
With over a million people now sheltering in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and only one third of the water pipes coming out of Israel currently operational, according to OCHA, the need for rapid humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave is growing by the day.
Roughly 500 trucks of humanitarian aid alone — never mind commercial supplies — are needed each day to meet the basic needs of the people in Gaza, according to Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians.
But since the start of the war, the number of trucks passing through in a day topped out at 300 — and that was on Nov. 28, during a week-long cease-fire. There are days when fewer than 10 trucks go through, according to Fowler. On a good day, maybe 200 or so, according to U.N. figures.
A small trickle of aid is entering Gaza through Egypt at the Rafah border crossing — four trucks here, eight trucks there. But most aid goes through Israel at crossings like Kerem Shalmon in the south.
For those tracking the flow of aid, however, it can be difficult to decipher how many trucks are entering Gaza or the lags between when aid enters and when it is distributed.
For instance, according to an update from Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit of the Israeli military that oversees the transfer of aid into Gaza, 131 trucks of humanitarian aid were inspected and made it into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Monday — as well as two tankers of fuel and four tankers of cooking gas.
But the same page COGAT page also said 100 trucks had gone through to Gaza, or possibly 133. As of Wednesday, numbers from UNRWA say nine trucks entered on Monday.
Aid experts say there can be inconsistencies between the numbers listed by COGAT and those provided by UNRWA.
