“HUNGER CATASTROPHE IN GAZA—DONATIONS NEEDED” cries Mercy Corps.
“URGENT: STARVATION IN GAZA: ALL GIFTS MATCHED FOR GAZA” shouts Rescue.org.
These and many other appeals from international relief organizations have motivated untold numbers of compassionate and generous souls to open their purses. You may be among them. If so, you may have thought that these organizations are delivering food, medicine and other relief supplies to Gaza. But they are not.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) confirms that not a single truck with relief aid has crossed the border from Egypt to Gaza since Israeli troops captured the Rafah border crossing on May 7, 2024, more than a month ago.
Until then, the Rafah crossing was the only one open. Today, roughly 1,800 mostly large 18-wheel trucks, each carrying up to 12 tons of supplies, are backed up into the Sinai Desert, waiting for Israeli permission to enter. Some have been there for months. And some of those trucks belong to the relief organizations. But they, like all the others, are not getting in.
Many of the organizations also announce that, thanks to your donations, they have provided hundreds of thousands or even millions of meals to starving Palestinians in Gaza. What they do not necessarily tell you is that they are doing this by purchasing food and medicine from the dwindling supplies inside Gaza.
The bottom line is that your money is reaching the relief organization’s operations in Gaza, but food, water and medical supplies are not. The amount of food in Gaza is dwindling, and Israel is allowing only a trickle to enter by isolated air drops, a single delivery by sea and occasional vehicles through the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel. For a pre-October 7th population of 2.3 million, this is nothing.
As supplies shrink inside Gaza, prices rise, and your donations increase the prices further. The same applies to all the needs of the population. More money is chasing fewer goods. At some point, no amount of money will buy food or medicine in Gaza. Already, Palestinians are dying of starvation, malnutrition and diseases caused by reduced resistance.
These are not often reported, because they are not victims of violent slaughter, and because the hospitals, clinics and mortuaries that would have reported them to the Ministry of Health—which would have tallied them—no longer exist. The Ministry of Health barely exists, while the weak die anonymously, buried by their families and communities. Some estimates of such casualties are already in the hundreds of thousands.
It is not that the relief agencies are not performing a worthwhile service. They are enabling increasingly scarce supplies to reach larger numbers of destitute people while they last. But they will not last, and the relief organizations are unable to bring in additional supplies.
Furthermore, they are mostly failing to be forthright with you by reporting these facts. Instead, they are projecting an image of success, with the result that you might think that they are maintaining a lifeline when in fact Gaza is heading to complete depletion of the few resources that remain.
This is what Israel intends. If the food is distributed equitably, a large proportion of the population will survive until the day there is nothing left. Then everyone will starve at the same time, and the genocide will be accomplished quickly with the last loaves of bread costing $1,000 apiece. And the humanitarian relief organizations will not have warned you.
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About the Author
Dr. Paul Larudee is a former Ford Foundation project supervisor and Fulbright-Hays lecturer in Lebanon, and US government advisor to Saudi Arabia.
He has been on the faculty of several universities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco and St. Mary’s College in Moraga.
He has been an organizer with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine and co-founder of the movement to break the Israeli naval siege of Gaza. He was aboard the boats that entered in 2008 and the 2010 Flotilla attacked by Israel. He was shot by an Israeli soldier in 2002.
He co-founded the Global March to Jerusalem, the Free Palestine Movement and the Syria Solidarity Movement, and went to Syria with delegations led by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire in 2013 and 2014. He was one of six US observers of the Syrian presidential elections in June, 2014.
He is treasurer of the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees, EIN 20-5516191, which is the parent nonprofit corporation of human rights projects like the Northern California chapter of the International Solidarity Movement, the Free Palestine Movement, the Syria Solidarity Movement and others, and which is authorized to accept tax-exempt donations for human rights advocacy.
Paul can be reached at: larudee@pacbell.net.
