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‘These are the scenes we have been warning about’
We have spoken to Ahmed Bayram, of the Norwegian Refugee Council, about the chaotic scenes at the aid distribution site in Rafah, southern Gaza, and the prior warnings by aid agencies.
“What we’re seeing is indeed a summary of the tragedy that the people of Gaza are living.
“To be honest, I have been describing this plan as a non-starter and today we see it’s a literal non-starter. You have been starving the entire population for almost three months, and then you’re asking them to walk miles and miles in order to get hold of a bag of lentils and a bag of flour.
“This is not how aid is done, this is not how aid should be distributed, not least obviously an occupied doing that – a country that has destroyed and flattened Rafah asking people to come back to Rafah, that has displaced people out of Rafah and now tells them to come back and receive whatever they can get hold of.
“These are the scenes we have literally been warning about all month now. “It spread chaos, it spread confusion and this is the result.
“I think the best thing that can be done now is for this plan to be cancelled, to be reversed and for us professional humanitarians in the UN and NGOs to do our job – there are tons and tons of aid waiting across the border, very simple decision, open the gates and keep them open.”
GHF parcels contain un-nutritious, meagre amount of food: AJ correspondent
While the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says it has handed out some 8,000 food boxes today, supposedly amounting to 462,000 meals, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary says that the parcels she’s seen contain only a meagre amount of food that will not feed a family for long and is not nutritious enough.
She said had seen a food box that contained 4kg of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, two cans of fava beans, a pack of tea bags and some biscuits, while other food parcels contained lentils and soup in very small quantities.
“This is definitely not enough, and it is not enough for all the humiliation that Palestinians are going through to receive these food parcels,” she said, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
“We’re talking about nearly three months without chicken, without meat, without nutritious food, and that’s why most people coming to the hospital now are malnourished Palestinian children.”
Khoudary said that while these GHF food parcels might last a family a day or two, Palestinians used to receive packages from United Nations agencies that would last one to two weeks – until Israel imposed its total blockade on aid almost three months ago, and people increasingly became so hungry they could often not even cobble together one meal a day.
“[The GHF says] 8,000 Palestinians received parcels today. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians squeezed into the area very close to Rafah [in southern Gaza], and all of these people said they were forced to go to these distribution points after weeks of not having even one meal a day,” she said.
Palestinians open a box delivered by the GHF in Rafah
WTF is that, tea biscuits...
