Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip – Like “Game Squid”. This is how residents describe it, invoking the dystopian television program during the story of the mortal glove that the obtaining of Gaza Haunted by Famine has become.
“It is a death race. The faster, the strongest, the luckiest – they could survive, could reach food,” said Mohammed Al -Shaqra, 30.
“It looks like we are animals, the race for a box of supplies as if our life depended on it. And they do it. “
Since Israel has sidelined the United Nations and other humanitarian aid organizations at the end of last month and has responsible for assistance operations in Gaza Humaninian Foundation, an opaque and Israeli private entrepreneur registered in Delaware, the murder was the daily companion of aid deliveries.
Thursday, the Gaza health authorities said that 12 people were killed near one of the foundation’s aid distribution centers, a relatively low toll in a week that saw 59 killed in similar circumstances on Tuesday. Since the Foundation began its work on May 26, more than 400 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured.
Al-Shaqra has become one of the victims this month.
On June 8, he gathered with thousands of others early in the morning near the aid center in the city of southern Gaza in Rafah. It was his third attempted food.
“I was desperate to bring something – flour, rice, pasta, anything – for my parents, my brothers and sisters and their children,” he said.
When the passage of the distribution center was opened, Al-Shaqra sprinted as quickly as he could, hoping to beat the others in the crowd and take a box. But then an Israeli quadcopter drone – he had buzzed above – began to drop explosives; The third bomb landed near him, he said.
Mohammed Al-Shaqra receives medical treatment inside a tent clinic at Nasser Hospital in Rafah, Gaza, June 12. He said he had gone to collect food plots in a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Gaza Distribution Center when an Israeli quadcopter has deposited explosives.
(Bilal Shbeir / For Times)
“My left arm broke. I looked down and saw the suspended bone, and there was great pain in my guts,” he said. Rocking his arm and trying to stop bleeding with his stomach, he stumbled for almost half a thousand before collapsing on a donkey cart. A good driver took him to a campaign hospital for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The doctors saved his arm.
The Foundation occurred online two months after Israel cut all the aids entering Gaza in March, justifying the blockade – despite the generalized degrobrium – as a means of putting pressure on the militant group of Hamas to release hostages even if the Palestinian authorities and the aid groups reported a famine crisis.
Although the United Nations and Humanitarian aid organizations have pleaded for access to feed around 2 million people in the Gaza Strip, Israel insisted that Hamas stole aid, an affirmation that the UN and other groups deny and for which Israel has never provided evidence. The alternative, said the Israeli government, is said to be the foundation.
The Palestinians flock to the aid center set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation of the United States and the United States in Souaniya, an area north of Gaza City on Tuesday.
(Saeed Mmt Jaras / Anadolu / Getty Images)
But the group was controversial from the start, so much so that its first choice as executive director even left before the aid deliveries, claiming that the foundation plan could not be implemented without “raping humanitarian principles”. Boston Consulting Group, who helped design the distribution system, ended his contract with the Foundation this month and dismissed two partners involved in the project.
Instead of using humanitarian workers, the Foundation has deployed private armed entrepreneurs with the Israeli army parked just a hundred meters. He also concentrated deliveries of help that the group calls four “fortified” centers in the south of Gaza rather than the approximately 400 smaller centers used by the UN and other aid groups across the enclave – forcing people already hungry to walk for miles through active combat areas to access deliveries.
Palestinians have food and other aids from Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah, Gaza. Hungry people had to walk for miles through active combat areas to access deliveries.
(Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press)
Gaza residents also complain about only one or two hubs generally operate a given day and rarely open at the announced time. He also never said what’s in food boxes. And rather than putting the boxes directly to people, the group workers throw them in place on pallets and watch the crowds swarm them. People meet in advance on safe roads designated by the Israeli army, but often find themselves under Israeli fire when they are allowed to approach the hubs.
“It is a real version of” squid game “. We run, then the shooting begins, we touched the ground and stay motionless so that we are not killed, then we run, “said Hussein Nizar, a resident who tried several times to get help, even after his neighbor Sameer was shot in the head.
“I watched him die next to me,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything to help because of all shots.”
Ahmed Abu Daqqa, a former hairdresser, receives treatment in a tent clinic at Nasser Hospital in Rafah, Gaza, June 12. He was shot down next to his right eye near a distribution point of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The ball fractured her skull and broke her nose.
(Bilal Shbeir / For Times)
The Israeli army has repeatedly answered questions about the murders near the aid centers saying that it would examine relationships of civilian victims. In a previous incident, he said the troops shot people who were threatening them.
Several Palestinians and a representative of the Foundation said that many shots occur when people exceed the limits of the safe path to try to go more quickly to the distribution site.
Even if they are not injured or killed, many go home empty -handed, said a 28 -year -old logistics worker hired by a local entrepreneur working with the foundation.
“Decisse people, especially the elderly and women with children, cannot fight through the crowd,” he said. He added that gangs also track people leaving the delivery area, seeking to fly and sell the precious supplies on the black market.
“Many of them wear knives. It’s like a trap, and I see a lot of people killed.”
When Al-Shaqra regained consciousness, he ended up at Nasser hospital, awaiting surgery in rooms that already overflowing other victims of this day at the aid center. Among them was his father, Wadee Al-Shaqra, who was injured by a bullet that torn the side of his abdomen.
The Palestinians who were injured by Israeli fires while they gathered near a food aid center await care on bloody soil at Nasser Hospital in the South Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
(AFP / Getty Images)
He lost track of his son after being killed, but found him a few hours later, in coincidence, in one of the few tents installed near the Nasser hospital for convalescent patients.
“I thought he had been killed. I was so happy to see him that I did not ask if he had food. I didn’t care,” said the father. He added that he and his son had gone to the hubs despite the danger because they did not have enough bread to share among his grandchildren.
“We are supposed to protect them,” he said. “We risk our lives just to prevent them from starving.”
The Foundation claims that its efforts were a success, praising its delivery of nearly 26 million “meals” during the 22 days since it started its operations. But with almost half a million people confronted at catastrophic levels of hunger and the entire population of acute food security, according to the integrated classification of the food security phase, deliveries represent approximately 0.6 meals per person.
The foundation does not explain how it defines a meal, but it previously declared that it calculated daily rations at 1,750 calories, well below the target of 2,200 calories used by humanitarian aid organizations. (The representative said that recent aid deliveries provide 2,500 calories provisions.)
Bedlam accompanying the group’s distribution practices, according to humanitarian workers, was entirely predictable.
The Palestinians wear an injured person after he and others went to a site to help the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation were attacked by Israeli forces on Tuesday near the Sudaniya region in Gaza.
(Saeed Mmt Jaras / Anadolu / Getty Images)
“The delivery of humanitarian aid can be a very simple operation, but it is complex,” said Juliette Touma, director of communications for the United Nations Agency for Palestinians, UNRWA.
She added that UNRWA and other groups have decades of experience at the service of the Palestinians, with complete registry lists and an ordered distribution system that attributes meetings in ideally placed centers. The help of the foundation, mainly including dry products such as pasta or lenses, requires gas and water to cook, both difficult to get Gaza. Help also does not include hygiene and cleaning products, she said-an essential requirement.
“There is this pure arrogance that the UN and humanitarian workers can be replaced – like that – by a third party, a private security company. It is not at all like that,” she said. “Let’s do our job.”
Saleem al-Najili, a 33-year-old nurse at the UK-Med Field Hospital in Deir Al Balah, now fears aid delivery time.
“Whenever the center of the GHF opens its doors, I know what will happen,” he said.
“It means more blood and crisis, more impossible on which we can treat. And fewer people that we can really save. “
Shbeir, a Times Special correspondent, reported to Deir AL GOOD. SThe writer Taff Bulos reported to Beirut.
