Jonathan Whittall, the head in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) has already condemned the methods used by the GHF. Israel told him his visa would not be renewed after he posted on social media a month ago that the GHF system had brought to Gaza “conditions created to kill… what we are seeing is carnage. It is weaponised hunger. It is forced displacement. It’s a death sentence for people just trying to survive. It appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life”.
After Israel announced its new measures, Whittall told the BBC that “the humanitarian situation in Gaza has never been worse”.
He said for Israel’s new measures to change matters for the better it would have to reduce the time it takes to allow trucks to transit the crossings into Gaza and improve the routes provided by the IDF for the convoys to use.
Israel would also need to provide “meaningful assurances that the people gathering to take food off the back of the trucks won’t be shot by Israeli forces”.
Whittall has been going in and out of Gaza since the war started, though that is now ending unless Israel decides not to withdraw his visa after all. He says that as IDF military operations continue “there remains an abhorrent disregard for humanitarian law”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant are already the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court last year, accused of joint criminal responsibility for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” Netanyahu, Gallant and the Israeli state deny the allegations.
Israel released grainy footage of a transport plane dropping pallets of aid into Gaza. Lines of parachutes billowed out the back of the aircraft in the dark of the night. The IDF said it had delivered seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar and tinned food.
In other wars I have seen aid being dropped, both from the aircraft themselves and close up on the ground as it lands.
Air dropping aid is an act of desperation. It can also look good on television, and spread a feel-good factor that something, at last, is being done.
It is a crude process, that will not on its own do much to end hunger in Gaza. Only a ceasefire and an unrestricted, long term aid operation can do that. Even big transport planes do not carry as much as a small convoy of lorries.