Humanitarian aid shipments at risk as talks between Israel, Hamas collapse

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The trucks slowly lumbered forward, passing single file through a gap in the seven-metre-high concrete barrier that separates Israel from the northern Gaza Strip. Twenty-eight flatbed trucks were allowed to enter on Sunday morning, each laden with giant sacks of Turkish flour.

The delivery – the second such convoy allowed to pass through the partly reopened Erez Crossing between Israel and Gaza – occurred one day after Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Programme, declared a “full-blown famine” in the north of Gaza, which she warned was spreading to other parts of the densely populated territory.

Aid agencies have accused Israel, which has laid siege to Gaza for almost seven months, of accelerating the food crisis by allowing only a trickle of aid to reach the strip’s 2.3 million residents.

The Erez Crossing was one of several border posts that Hamas fighters destroyed during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis and foreigners and saw the militant group take some 200 hostages back into Gaza. Israel’s subsequent assault – aimed at destroying Hamas and returning the hostages – has left more than 34,000 Gazans dead, according to the Palestinian ministry of health in the territory.

Hopes that the humanitarian catastrophe might soon ease fell on Sunday when ceasefire talks appeared to collapse. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government could not accept Hamas’s terms, which would have seen the multistage release of the more than 100 hostages it is believed to still be holding in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal and the end of the war.

In a video statement, Mr. Netanyahu said Hamas was “entrenched in its extreme positions, first among them the demand to remove all our forces from the Gaza Strip, end the war and leave Hamas in power.” Accepting those terms, he said, “would be a terrible defeat for the State of Israel.”

Almost 80 per cent of Gazans have been driven from their homes by the fighting thus far, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that delivers aid to Palestinian refugees.

Israel challenges both the accuracy of the term “famine” and the accusation that it is to blame for the slow pace of aid delivery. The Globe and Mail was among a group of foreign media organizations invited to Erez on Sunday to witness the entry of the trucks, which had already received security clearance after the flour arrived via the nearby port of Ashdod.

“It is our understanding that there is a sufficient amount of food making its way into the Gaza Strip and into northern Gaza. And it’s also our understanding that the UN agencies feel the same way based on the conversations that we have with them,” said Shimon Freedman, a spokesman for COGAT. (COGAT is the Israeli agency that implements government policies in Gaza and in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.)

Mr. Freedman described the humanitarian situation as “stable,” though he wouldn’t offer a definition of what that meant in terms of how much food Gazans are receiving.

The gap between what international aid organizations say is happening in Gaza and Israel’s version of events is difficult to reconcile – particularly as Israel and Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza, have not allowed any foreign journalists to enter the strip since the start of the war. The passenger terminal at Erez, the primary entry point for media before Oct. 7, is still unusable, Mr. Freedman said.

He contended that enough aid is getting into Gaza – some 350 trucks a day, he said, via various crossings, including the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. Aid trucks entering the territory daily are still below the roughly 500 entering before the war.

He said many of the problems lie on the distribution side, after the aid is delivered to humanitarian organizations operating inside the strip.

But Mr. Freedman also said that Israel had “decided to phase out” its co-operation in Gaza with UNRWA.

Those working to deliver aid say it’s impossible for them to operate in Gaza without UNRWA’s help.

“UNRWA is the backbone for the humanitarian operation. Without UNRWA, there is no humanitarian operation in Gaza,” said Dominic Allen, the Palestinian representative for the UN Population Fund, which focuses on the needs of women and girls. “Every supply, every box, every truck, every carton that enters Gaza passes through UNRWA’s hands.”

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Mr. Freedman repeated Israel’s long-standing allegation that UNRWA has been “infiltrated” by Hamas. Canada was one of 16 countries that suspended aid to UNRWA in January after Israel alleged that 12 members of the agency’s staff had taken part in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Canada resumed its support with a $25-million payment in March, shortly before an independent review, headed by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, found that Israel had not provided sufficient supporting evidence to back its claims about UNRWA.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a Canadian lobby group, has launched a court challenge of the federal government’s decision to resume assistance to UNRWA. The application is supported by relatives of four Canadian citizens who were killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

Ceasefire talks had appeared to make progress over the weekend – Arab media reported that Hamas was willing to accept the deal brokered by Egypt and the United States – only to collapse over whether the halt in fighting would be temporary or permanent.

A Hamas delegation that had travelled to Cairo for talks reportedly agreed to release 33 hostages in the first stage of a deal that would gradually see more Israeli hostages released for a halt in military operations and the release of a list of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. However, Hamas wanted the deal to signify the end of the war, and to receive guarantees that Israel would not attack the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Mr. Netanyahu’s government is unwilling to declare a definitive end to the war while Hamas still exists as a political and military force in Gaza. Despite escalating international pressure not to invade Rafah – where an estimated one million people have taken refuge, many of them in tents – Mr. Netanyahu has vowed Israeli troops will enter the city, which is regarded as the last Hamas stronghold.

“The end game, the goals, of the ceasefire and hostage talks have been mutually exclusive for months now,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

The only new development, Ms. Zonszein said, was the rising pressure on Mr. Netanyahu – from both the international community and within Israel – to agree to a ceasefire deal. “Most Israelis who want the hostages back as a priority understand that it’s this or nothing.”

For now, the war rages on. The Gaza Health Ministry – which doesn’t distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count – said Sunday that 29 people had been killed and 110 injured over the previous 24 hours alone. Three Israeli soldiers were reportedly injured in fighting inside Gaza over the same period, and seven people were wounded in a Hamas rocket attack targeting the Israeli side of Kerem Shalom, another key crossing point for aid entering Gaza.

At Erez, drones could be heard operating overhead – interrupted by the occasional booms of Israeli artillery fire and sporadic rattles of smaller-arms fire – as the aid trucks crossed into Gaza. At least one of the truck drivers, an Arabic speaker who gave his name as Amer, seemed surprised to learn that he would be driving his vehicle several hundred metres into an active war zone.

“I’m not going in, am I?” he asked a soldier incredulously after arriving on the Israeli side of the Erez Crossing.

“Yes, you are,” the soldier replied.

“Delivering this food is very important,” Amer told The Globe later, as he waited for his turn to drive into Gaza. “But maybe you could go instead of me?”