‘Death Race’ for food: hundreds killed in Gaza Aid Chaos

Deir Al Balah, Gaza – Such as “Squid Game.” That is how residents describe it, who evoke the dystopian TV program when telling the deadly glove that get help in famine-needed Gaza.

“It’s a death race. The faster, the stronger, the happier side are those who may survive, perhaps reach the food,” said 30-year-old Mohammed Al-Shaqra.

“It feels like we are animals, racing for a box of supplies as if our lives are dependent on it. And they do that.”

Since Israel put the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations offside at the end of last month and relied care activities at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaque American and private contractor supported by Israel and Israel, it has been the almost-daily guidance for aid.

On Thursday, the health authorities in Gaza said that 12 people were killed near a GHF distribution center, a relatively low toll in a week in which 59 was killed on Tuesday in comparable circumstances. Since the foundation started on 26 May, more than 400 people have been killed and more than 3,000 injured.

Al-Shaqra became one of victims this month.

On 8 June he gathered early in the morning with thousands of others near the GHF center in the southern Gaza city of Rafa. It was his third attempt to get food.

“I was desperate to bring something back – flour, rice, pasta, everything – for my parents, my brothers and sisters and their children,” he said.

When the passage to the distribution center was opened, Al-Shaqra sprinted as fast as he could, hoping to beat others in the crowd and grab a box. But then an Israeli quadcopter – drone – he buzzed above – started to drop explosives; The third bomb landed close to him, he said.

“My left arm shattered. I looked down and saw the bone hanging, and there was a sharp pain in my intestines,” he said. He rocked with his arm and tried to stop bleeding from his stomach, he stumbled almost half a mile before he collapsed on a donkey car. A friendly driver brought him to a field hospital for the international community of the Red Cross. The doctors have saved his arm.

The GHF came online two months after Israel had cut off all the help of Gaza in March and justify the blockade – despite the widespread Opprobrium – as a way to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages, even if Palestinian authorities and auxiliary groups reported a hunger crisis.

Although the UN and humanitarian organizations argue for access to feed the approximately 2 million people in the Gaza Strip, Israel insisted that Hamas stealed help, a claim that the UN and other groups deny and for which Israel has never provided proof. The alternative, the Israeli government said, would be the GHF.

Palestinians come to the auxiliary center set up by the US and Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Sudaniya, an area north of Gaza City, Gaza, on Tuesday.

(Saeed MMT Jaras / Anadolu / Getty images)

But the GHF was controversial from the start, so much even that it first chose to stop as executive director before Aid Levers even started, and said that the foundation’s plan could not be implemented without “violating humanitarian principles”. Boston Consulting Group, who helped in designing the distribution system, ended his contract with the GHF earlier this month and fired two partners involved in the project.

Instead of using humanitarian employees, the GHF has used armed private contractors with the Israeli soldiers just a hundred meters or so removed. It also concentrated help from help to what the GHF calls four “reinforced” hubs in southern Gaza instead of the approximately 400 smaller centers that are used by the UN and other auxiliary groups about the enclave – so that hungry people have to walk kilometers through active battle zones to access the deliveries.

Palestinians wear food and other help from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah, Gaza. Hungry people had to run for miles through active combat zones to gain access to deliveries.

(Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press)

Gaza residents also complain that only one or two hubs usually work on a certain day and rarely open the announced time. It has never said what is in the food boxes. And instead of handing over the boxes directly to people, ghf employees dump them instead on pallets and look at crowds swarms over them. People gather hours in advance for safe routes designated by the Israeli army, but are often under Israeli fire when he can approach the hubs.

‘It is a real version of’ Squid Game ‘. We run, then the shooting begins, we touch the ground and stay still, so we are not killed, then run again, “said Hussein Nizar, a resident who repeatedly tried to get help, even after his neighbor Ameen Sameer was shot in the head.

“I saw him die next to me,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything to help because of all the shooting.”

Ahmed Abu Daqqa, a former hairdresser, will receive a treatment on 12 June in a tent clinic in the Nasser Hospital in Rafah, Gaza. He was shot next to his right eye near a distribution point of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The bullet broke his skull and broke his nose.

(Bilal Shbeir / for time)

The Israeli army has repeatedly responded to questions about murders near GHF locations by saying that the reports of civilian casualties would investigate. In an earlier incident, it said that troops shot people who approached them in a threatening way.

Various Palestinians and a spokesperson for GHF – who gave his name as Majed – said that many of the shootings take place when people run past the boundaries of the safe route in an attempt to reach the distribution site faster.

Even if they are not injured or killed, many go home empty-handed, said Jassim, a 28-year logistics employee who has been hired by a local contractor who works with the GHF.

“Decent people, especially the elderly and women with children, can’t fight because of the crowds,” he said. He added that gangs also chase people to leave the delivery area to rob them and to sell the precious supplies on the black market.

“Many of them wear knives. It’s like a fall and I see many people killing.”

When Al-Shaqra regained consciousness, he was in the Nasser Hospital, waiting for an operation in rooms that already flooded with other victims from the attacks of that day in the GHF center. Among them was his father, Wadee Al-Shaqra, who was injured by a bullet that tore through the side of his belly.

Palestinians who were injured by Israeli fire when they gathered near a Food Aid Center, waiting for care on a bloody floor in the Nasser hospital in the southern Gaza strip on Tuesday.

(AFP / Getty images)

Wadee lost sight of his son after he had been shot, but found him hours later, by chance, in one of the few tents that have been set up near Nasser Hospital for convalescing patients.

“I thought he was killed. I was so happy to see him that I didn’t ask if he got food. I didn’t care,” Wadee said. He added that he and Al-Shaqra went to the hubs despite the danger, because they didn’t have enough bread to share with his grandchildren.

“We have to protect them,” he said. “We risk our lives to prevent them from starving.”

The GHF says that his efforts have been a success and his delivery of nearly 26 million “meals” in the 22 days since it started with activities. But with almost half a million people who are confronted with catastrophic levels of hunger and the entire population fighting with acute food security, according to the integrated classification of the food safety phase, deliveries amount to around 0.6 meals per person.

The GHF does not go how it defines a meal, but it has previously stated that it calculated daily rations in 1,750 calories, well below the purpose of 2,200 calories used by humanitarian organizations. (Majed said that recent emergency help from 2500 calories offers.)

Bedlam at the distribution practices of GHF, say care providers, was completely predictable.

Palestinians wear an injured man after he and others on his way to a Humanitarian Foundation assistance site of Gaza, were attacked by Israeli troops near the Sudaniya area in Gaza on Tuesday.

(Saeed MMT Jaras / Anadolu / Getty images)

“The delivery of humanitarian aid can be a very simple operation, but it is a complex,” said Juliette Touma, communication director for the UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA.

She added that UNRWA and other groups have decades of experience with serving Palestinians, with extensive registering lists and an orderly distribution system that assigns agreements in handy placed centers. The GHF help, which mainly include dry goods, such as pasta or lentils, requires gas and water to cook, both of which are difficult to obtain in Gaza. GHF -Help also does not include hygiene and cleaning supplies, she said – an essential requirement.

“There is this pure arrogance that the UN and Humanitarians can be replaced – just like that – by a third party, a private security company. It’s not at all,” she said. “Let’s do our work.”

Saleem Al-Najili, a 33-year-old nurse in the UK-Med Field Hospital in Deir Al Balah, is now afraid of GHF’s ​​delivery times.

“Every time the GHF center opens its doors, I know what is coming,” he said.

“It means more blood and screaming, more impossible decisions about who we can treat. And we can actually save fewer people.”

Shbeir, A Time Special correspondent, reported from Deir Al Good. Turn sTaff writer Bulos reported to Beirut.