A senior officer from Israel\u2019s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories even brought journalists to the Gazan side of the Strip\u2019s Kerem Shalom Crossing on Friday, where he declared that aid piling up there was \u201cdue to a lack of cooperation from the international community and international organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Satterfield, who served as the US humanitarian envoy during the early months of the Gaza war, hit back at the Israeli claim in a recent interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is disingenuous \u2013 knowingly false \u2013 for any party to assert that it is failure, lack of courage, or deliberate conspiratorial withholding of aid by the UN or international organizations that is responsible for the humanitarian suffering in Gaza,\u201d Satterfield said.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\tBy signing up, you agree to the terms<\/a><\/p>\n But when aid transport roads become too badly damaged by Israeli military operations, when there are insufficient deconfliction mechanisms in place to ensure that aid workers don\u2019t accidentally get hit by IDF fire, when authorizations aren\u2019t given by the army for aid to be picked up and delivered, and when looting becomes so widespread due to widespread food insecurity; an environment is created where the UN is physically prevented from doing its job, the former US envoy explained.<\/p>\n \t US Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues, David Satterfield speaks to the press during the US State Department press briefing in Washington DC, United States on April 24, 2024. (Yasin Ozturk \/ Anadolu via Reuters)<\/p>\n While still blaming the UN, Israel appeared to tacitly recognize its complicity in the humanitarian crisis on Saturday, by announcing a series of steps it planned to take in order to alleviate the situation; including establishing new corridors for the UN to safely deliver aid, instituting humanitarian pauses to its military operations in densely populated areas, reconnecting the power line to Gaza\u2019s only desalination and launching its own airdrops of food and medicine for the first time.<\/p>\n Although those steps are critical, Satterfield maintained that if they\u2019re not fused with a broader surge of aid into the Strip from as many crossings as possible, the hunger crisis will not be fully mitigated.<\/p>\n Desperation breeds violence<\/p>\n Since Israel lifted its aid blockade in late May after 78 days, assistance has primarily been delivered through the newly-established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and existing mechanisms operated by the UN and international organizations.<\/p>\n Both mechanisms have been prone to violence, with UN trucks repeatedly looted by thousands of desperate Palestinians, unsure when they\u2019ll receive their next meal for themselves and their families.<\/p>\n GHF boasts that it manages to transport aid to distribution sites without facing the same violence, but that is because it is delivering assistance through areas that the IDF has largely cleared of Palestinians.<\/p>\n Moreover, while trucks haven\u2019t been looted en route to GHF sites, the scenes at those sites aren\u2019t radically different from those at looted UN convoys, where aid workers fall back to allow thousands to frantically rummage through boxes of assistance, rather than try to distribute it in an orderly fashion.<\/p>\n \t A Palestinian woman mourns over the body of a man said to have been killed near a food distribution center run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US- and Israel-backed organization, at the Nasser hospital on July 19, 2025 (AFP)<\/p>\n GHF has also faced criticism for forcing Palestinians to walk long distances, often coming under deadly fire when crossing IDF lines to pick up aid.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have a population in desperate straits \u2014 more desperate than at any point since the October 7 massacre and when the initial cut-off of assistance began,\u201d Satterfield said.<\/p>\n That desperation breeds violence \u2014 either from civilians themselves who don\u2019t comply with directives aimed at ensuring an orderly distribution process, and who then have faced gunfire from what reports<\/a> have indicated are trigger-happy<\/a> Israeli soldiers or American contractors.<\/p>\n The other form of violence has come from criminal gangs or Hamas operatives, whom the IDF accuses of trying to induce chaotic scenes near aid distribution sites.<\/p>\n \u2018Flooding the zone\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an established, proven way of confronting and overcoming these problems, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly in Gaza since the Fall of 2023, which is to \u2018flood the zone,’\u201d Satterfield said. \u201cYou deliver assistance at scale and you do so on a sustained basis to wherever populations are present.\u201d<\/p>\n Giving a rough estimate, the former US humanitarian envoy said at least 350 trucks of aid need to come through multiple crossings each day.<\/p>\n Since Israel partially lifted its aid blockade on May 19, an average of just about 70 aid trucks have entered Gaza each day.<\/p>\n Even if Israel reaches the 350 mark, Satterfield explained that there still will be an initial period of looting that could last up to two weeks until Palestinians have more confidence that they will be able to continue securing food for their families in the future.<\/p>\n \t Palestinians hold onto an aid truck returning to Gaza City from the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo\/Jehad Alshrafi, file)<\/p>\n Moreover, looting carried out for purposes of commoditization will also dissipate because the value of assistance in the marketplace will drop due to the rise in supply.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not theory. It\u2019s what happens,\u201d Satterfield said.<\/p>\n While the UN has refused to cooperate with GHF, arguing that the US- and Israeli-backed organization is a tool of the Israeli government to displace and endanger Palestinians, the former US envoy argued that the GHF can and should continue to operate as an additive to international organizations in a \u201cflood the zone\u201d scenario.<\/p>\n UN risk calculus<\/p>\n Addressing the Israeli criticism of the UN for not adequately picking up aid that has amassed at Gaza crossings, Satterfield agreed with the UN retort<\/a> that the Kerem Shalom and Zikim platforms at the Gaza border are not \u201cMcDonald\u2019s drive-throughs\u201d that can be accessed at will.<\/p>\n Moreover, aid transport routes, which became complex and difficult to maneuver once the war started, have become severely damaged since the IDF\u2019s May 2024 takeover of the southern Gaza city of Rafah.<\/p>\n \u201cThe high level of civilian unrest, lack of law and order, the presence of gangs and criminal elements and a desperate population makes movement off these platforms exceedingly difficult,\u201d Satterfield said. \u201cDeconfliction and coordination with the IDF is a complicated process in itself, as most moves by the humanitarian community require explicit approval from the IDF regarding timing and routes.\u201d<\/p>\n The UN and international organizations take all of these factors into consideration when assessing their ability to pick up aid from the Kerem Shalom platform in south Gaza and the Zikim platform in north Gaza.<\/p>\n \t Volunteers from Palestinian families guard trucks carrying aid that entered the Gaza Strip from the Zikim border crossing, June 25, 2025. (Bashar TALEB \/ AFP)<\/p>\n They are not risk-averse and are willing to put their staff in a high degree of danger in order to deliver aid, Satterfield said, noting that some of those workers have even lost their lives in the process.<\/p>\n \u201cThey only halt movements when they believe they would put their trucks and their drivers into absolutely certain harm\u2019s way,\u201d the former US humanitarian envoy maintained.<\/p>\n Satterfield pointed out that the past week isn\u2019t the first time that Israel highlighted the large quantity of aid at the Gaza border that isn\u2019t picked up,\u00a0adding that the pallets at earlier points in the war reached over 1,500 truckloads.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not the tragic fact of starvation and deprivation that drives movement off the platforms,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is the physical ability to [transport]\u2026 without violence. That\u2019s always been the calculus.\u201d<\/p>\n Is Hamas stealing aid?<\/p>\n Over the weekend, The New York Times \u2014 citing two senior military officials \u2014 reported<\/a> that Israel has never found evidence that Hamas has \u201csystemically\u201d stolen aid from the UN. The IDF denied<\/a> the story.<\/p>\n For his part, Satterfield said \u201cthere\u2019s no question\u201d that the terror group has worked to take \u201cpolitical advantage and certainly some physical substantive advantage out of the aid distribution process.\u201d<\/p>\n Hamas operatives have made a point of \u201cflaunting\u201d their presence at aid sites in a message to Palestinians that the terror group has no intention of ceding its role in the distribution process.<\/p>\n However, Satterfield maintained that \u201cthe bulk of all assistance delivered by the UN and by the international organizations has gone to the population of Gaza and not to Hamas. 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