The challenge in expanding aid to Gaza

Politico

10 hours ago

'FAMINES HAVE MOMENTUM' — President Donald Trump signaled a subtle shift within the White House last week, publicly recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Trump acknowledged 'real starvation' in Gaza, while Vice President J.D. Vance urged Israel to increase humanitarian aid access. Other top U.S. officials visited Gaza to witness the humanitarian crisis for themselves before devising an aid plan for the area.
The recalibration reflects mounting pressure from both Democrats and Trump allies to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza, as over 1000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to receive aid, and international watchdogs warn of a widespread famine. Globally, U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have announced that they will recognize a state of Palestine in September if a ceasefire agreement is not reached or if the Palestinian Authority commits to reforms and elections, respectively.
But despite an increased willingness from Trump officials to confirm the existence of a humanitarian crisis, the administration has been light on actual details. Malnutrition remains a widespread problem, even as Israel has started daily pauses in military operations in parts of Gaza and Israel and the U.K. have airdropped aid. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — the two officials who visited Gaza 't o help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza' — have also yet to share specifics on what that plan could look like.
The silence may in part be because increasing aid is a complicated task — especially in a conflict-ridden area like the Gaza Strip. To better understand the state of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza and the challenges to delivering humanitarian aid, Nightly spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former director of USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and former executive of the agency's Covid-19 task force.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
At the moment, most aid being distributed in Gaza is organized by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is designed to replace the United Nations aid operation. Since Israel announced this plan in May, many aid organizations refused to work with the organization. Why are aid groups against GHF, and what has changed since they took over aid operations?
There's three main complaints that the traditional aid apparatus — the UN-led and NGO-organized aid system that has operated pretty effectively throughout much of the war — have.
First, GHF was very much pitched not as additive, but as a substitution, as an alternative. At the same time, the Israeli government is facilitating and really working kind of hand in glove with GHF. GHF even seems to operate like an extension of the IDF and the Israeli presence; they coordinate very, very closely with the IDF in Gaza. That is also being used then as a rationale by the Israeli government for suppressing the rest of the humanitarian system in Gaza.
The GHF just has orders of magnitude less capacity and less reach than the traditional aid architecture had. It's not in any meaningful way, a replacement or substitution. It's run by people who are not humanitarian professionals and don't, frankly, have a background, or qualifications, or knowledge or expertise to really do that effectively.
The second complaint would be that the model of the GHF puts Palestinians at enormous risk. In order to seek aid from GHF, Palestinians have to run this militarized gauntlet down [the coastal road] and then down the Morag Corridor in order to get to the aid sites. That has produced almost daily massacres.
The third is that it's also just wildly inadequate relative to both the scale and the scope of the humanitarian needs in Gaza today. Gaza today is going headlong into a famine. The way you fight famine is not only with food, and this is a well-established humanitarian doctrine that when a population is moving into famine, you need to provide food, yes, but the type of food needs to be appropriately fortified and nutritious and adequately cover the full range of nutritional requirements.
The GHF distribution boxes don't really do that. If you're distributing dried food aid that still needs to be prepared, then people need cooking fuel to prepare that. They need shelter and kitchen sets and places to prepare that and the goods with which to prepare it. They need clean water, both for their own drinking, sanitation, hygiene, and of course, to prepare the food. They need really specialized nutritional support, including inpatient malnutrition treatment therapies for people who reach an advanced stage of malnutrition. The pictures that have been coming out of kids in an advanced state of severe, acute malnutrition, those kids can't eat the food that GHF is distributing. Their bodies would not tolerate it at this point.
And then finally you need robust health care because we know from famines past, that sometimes a majority, and certainly a large share of the people who die in famines die of disease before starvation takes them.
Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that GHF delivers more than a million meals a day. Does this align with what you're hearing on the ground, and what is in these dried food packs?
There's not a lot of transparency about how they're reaching that number, about what's in the food packs, and about how they're calculating what constitutes a meal, even if you take that entirely at face value. I don't know, for example, what's the denominator of what they consider a meal. Is that 800 calories? How much food are they considering constitutes a meal? Of course, normally, a person needs three meals a day, and there's around 2 million people in Gaza. If you look at it that way, a million meals a day, even at face value, is maybe a sixth of the food needs that Gaza has. So, it's not remotely sufficient.
It has been widely reported that thousands of aid trucks are waiting outside Gaza. What are the obstacles stopping that aid from reaching Gazans?
The principal obstacle is Israeli government policy. During the ceasefire, the Israeli government would allow aid groups to drive trucks across the border directly to the where their warehouses inside Gaza through multiple points of entry around Gaza. There was enough aid that was getting in through that channel that no one had much of an incentive to try and pillage those convoys because there was sufficient aid getting in. Convoys get pillaged when people are so desperate, and they have been so deprived that they're fearful that if they don't get what's on the convoy in front of them, they don't know when or where the next round of aid will be coming from.
The bottom line is, there was a system that was working. It was working well, and the Israelis shut it down when they when they were trying to put pressure on Hamas in March, they shut that system down. The variable there, what toggles that on and off, is Israeli government policy. You can just look at the difference between the aid that was going in during the ceasefire, and then what happened in March and April when nothing got in.
What needs to happen to alleviate the starvation and malnutrition in Gaza?
What needs to happen is a massive scale up of humanitarian access and humanitarian delivery across every part of Gaza. One of the core principles of humanitarian response is you want to bring the aid as close to where the people are as possible. You don't make the people traverse a combat zone in order to get to an aid distribution site. You bring the aid to where they are. That's very possible. Gaza is not a big place.
I've overseen U.S. government responses to hunger catastrophes in Yemen, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in northeast Nigeria, and in my NGO career in Somalia with the 2011 famine as well. Those were all large, logistically complicated places with huge populations. Gaza is a tiny place with 2 million people. If humanitarian groups had access and were not being impeded from doing their work, they could scale up a very robust response, really rapidly. But the limiting factor is political obstruction of their ability to do that. If that were removed, what they would then ramp up the distribution of appropriately nutritious food and alongside that, you scale up nutrition support programs. And of course, sanitation and hygiene are really important.
If no significant changes are made, what do you see as the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis?
It will continue to get worse. Famines have momentum. The more malnourished, the more vulnerable a population gets, the more of them become vulnerable to dying. When you have a huge swath of the population that is in a state of significant malnutrition, and you've got a huge population of people who are succumbing to disease, succumbing to injury, the risk to them grows and grows the longer that they're in that in that situation.
I think the further someone deteriorates into a state of severe malnutrition, the harder and more expensive and more time consuming it is to return them to health. What happens in a famine situation, is because as you go further down that trajectory, the number of people at risk and the amount of effort it takes to stabilize them grows exponentially, thereby, too, the risk of mortality grows exponentially the longer that it is allowed to progress. The fear that I have is that what we're seeing now in Gaza, with these daily clusters of deaths from starvation is kind of the leading edge of that exponential trajectory.
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