Aid groups are unloading food and other critical supplies in the Gaza Strip, after a monthslong blockade that has put children at risk of famine. The trickle of relief comes amid growing pressure on Israel to ease the suffering among civilians.
Yet even the stepped-up attention from world leaders is too measured, aid groups working in Gaza say, and has not yet resulted in anywhere near enough tangible supplies and food on the ground.
A United Nations-supported report released earlier this month sounded the alarm about intensifying hunger and “acute” child malnutrition in Gaza. Without intervention, critical food supplies are “expected to run out in the coming weeks,” it warned.
Why We Wrote This
The first deliveries of humanitarian supplies are beginning in Gaza after an 11-week Israeli blockade. For aid groups, Western help meeting a hunger crisis is vital, but hasn’t yet resulted in enough food and supplies.
The report was not news to the Israeli government. Cutting off supplies was part of a deliberate tactic by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to destroy Hamas, which perpetrated the October 2023 attack against Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking more than 250 men, women, and children hostage.
Part of Israel’s plan, analysts say, involves starving the terrorist group’s fighters out of the shadows by forcing them to use up food stored in its mass network of tunnels – and pressing the group to give up hostages. If Palestinian civilians lack food, the reasoning goes, it might inspire enough anger to foment a popular uprising to reject and overthrow Hamas once and for all.
Internationally, pressure is mounting on Israel in a war in which some 53,000 people in Gaza have been killed. That tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The United Kingdom suspended free trade talks, and several aid groups call Israeli actions in Gaza a war crime. Canada, France, and the United Kingdom this week warned of “concrete actions” if Israel did not halt its plans for a major invasion and allow in humanitarian aid.
Yet condemnations do not amount to relief, groups working to help Gaza’s civilians say. Why, they ask, have Western allies – who have some sway over Mr. Netanyahu – failed to push through more humanitarian aid, including for children, who make up nearly half of Gaza’s population?
“Europe is a very important actor in pressuring Israel on this,” says Mahmoud Alsaqqa, who leads Gaza food security operations for Oxfam, a British nongovernmental organization focused on poverty relief. “We are looking for that pressure.”
Mr. Alsaqqa met a family in Gaza this week that has gone six days without “any piece of bread because they cannot afford it, cannot get it – there are no food supplies.” People are prioritizing children, he says, but some days they are unable to get a meal for even the youngest family members.
Attention from U.S. leaders
Within the United States, some movement to mitigate the suffering appears to be mounting. A resolution in Congress last week calling for immediate delivery of food and aid to Gaza has been co-sponsored by all but one Senate Democrat. Ninety-six Democratic members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to Israel’s ambassador in early May opposing Israel’s block on humanitarian aid, calling it “morally wrong.”
Though no Republicans signed on to the rebukes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Israel for a partial lifting of the blockade under pressure this week. Mr. Netanyahu said he did it because “our best friends in the world, senators whom I know as passionate supporters of Israel,” were voicing concerns.
“We are pleased to see that aid is starting to flow again,” Secretary Rubio said.
President Donald Trump, Mr. Netanyahu’s most influential and, up until recently, resolute ally, said that “A lot of people are starving” in Gaza on the final day of his Middle East tour last week. “And we’re going to get that taken care of.”
On the ground in Gaza
Words from world leaders are helpful and “needed,” but it remains to be seen what will come of them, says Mr. Alsaqqa, who is currently living in western Gaza. He is able to eat chickpeas and canned tuna for lunch because he has a job and can pay the 30% in fees required to take out the cash to buy these goods, he says. “I am privileged.”
But most people in Gaza today are not. A 55-pound sack of flour costs an average of $380, according to the U.N.-backed report known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification platform.
That means that most families struggle to afford one meal a day. Community kitchens have been a lifeline, but some 80% of them have now shut down due to lack of supplies from the 11-week blockade, Mr. Alsaqqa says.
The aid that Israel has recently started allowing to flow is expected to include supplies like infant formula, but the number of trucks arriving is “not enough,” he adds. “We have more than 9,000 trucks stuck in Jordan and Egypt [waiting to deliver aid]. This is the issue.”
Israel has blocked aid into Gaza because it says it’s being siphoned off to sustain Hamas fighters hiding in the tunnels. This is one of the most frequent claims by Israel in its criticism of the U.N.-led humanitarian system, says Chris Newton, senior early warning analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Yet while Israel has offered “evidence for some other claims about Hamas, systematic theft of aid by Hamas has not been shown,” he says. What is clear is that organized looting was happening as aid trucks were entering Gaza during the fall and winter.
“You’d get gangs of armed men looting aid convoys just inside official border crossings – often within direct line of sight of Israeli military positions in areas they controlled and surveilled,” Mr. Newton says.
A leaked U.N. memo reported by The Washington Post concluded that the looting was supported, at least tacitly, by Israeli security forces because it allows them to say, “‘Look, the U.N.-led aid system can’t handle itself inside Gaza,’” Mr. Newton adds.
A new humanitarian relief effort
The Trump administration is backing a controversial alternative to U.N.-delivered aid involving a group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The organization’s executive director, Jake Wood, is a former U.S. Marine who previously co-founded Team Rubicon, a group started in the midst of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and made up largely of U.S. veteran volunteers doing disaster relief work.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has said that it plans to hire private U.S. security firms – both of which are run by former U.S. Special Forces soldiers – to guard “secure distribution sites.” This has been criticized as a militarization of aid.
The Israeli military will not be stationed at food distribution hubs but will be present “at a distance,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has said. Amid concerns that Israel will use facial recognition to screen aid recipients – which UNICEF has decried as tantamount to the “monitoring of beneficiaries for intelligence purposes” – Mr. Wood has said that he will not share any personally identifiable information about aid recipients with Israel.
There are critiques, too, that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will not provide enough distribution hubs. In response, the group has requested to expand the number of secure aid delivery centers. But this is precisely the sort of work in which humanitarian agencies excel, says Mr. Newton, “if they’re allowed to do their jobs.”
It’s complex and dangerous work. The Biden administration’s much-anticipated Gaza pier last year was beset by rough seas and injuries to U.S. military personnel. It was functional for roughly 20 days, The Washington Post reports, at an estimated cost of $230 million, and it ultimately delivered only a fraction of the humanitarian relief, analysts say, that officials had hoped to provide.
Steve Witkoff, U.S. envoy to the Middle East, told the Security Council that the U.S. would stop funding U.N. agencies that don’t back the new foundation.
The Israeli government, too, has expressed support for what it calls “the American humanitarian plan,” which Mr. Wood has said he hopes to have up and running by the end of the month.
“There is no time to wait for ideal conditions,” he said in a statement. “We have a responsibility to act.”
Anna Mulrine Grobe reported from Brussels, and staff writer Caitlin Babcock contributed reporting from Washington.
