The difficulties of getting aid into Gaza
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Lorries carrying vital aid are finally returning to Gaza. The aid is getting through from here and it is getting to bakeries in Gaza. This is a holding inspection compound. All of the aid that's coming in to Gaza comes through here. It's taken off these Israeli trucks, it's inspected, put onto Gazan trucks and sent through there. The deliveries have resumed after a more than two-month blockade during which Israel had stopped all food, fuel and medicine from entering the territory.

Israel says it wanted to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages, and it's accused Hamas of stealing supplies to give to its fighters or to sell to raise money. The UN has denied that aid has been diverted. The blockade compounded an already dire situation. According to famine experts, one in five people in Gaza face starvation.

I'm William Lee Adams, and you're listening to What in the World from the BBC World Service. In this episode, we're asking, what do we know about aid getting into Gaza? Just a recap before we get into this. Gaza is a thin strip of land between Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the U.K., and other nations, won Palestinian elections there back in 2006.

On the 7th of October, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. That triggered a massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. In January 2025, Israel and Hamas agreed a deal for a ceasefire and to release Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. 58 hostages are still held in Gaza, around 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

I'm joined by the BBC's Middle East correspondent, Yolande Nell. Hi, Yolande. Hello, good morning. So you're based in the BBC's Jerusalem bureau. And before we start, I'm just curious, how long have you been based there and covering events in the Middle East?

So I've been based in the Middle East for some 15 years now, and I used to live in Egypt. For a long time, I've been in Jerusalem. Before this war, I used to go regularly to Gaza. Since the war started, though, of course, international journalists have not been allowed to go there to report freely. And you've covered some really harrowing stories over the years. I'm just curious, is it ever difficult for you as a person to get up each day and keep going, keep covering this?

Yeah, and this war has been really relentless. And of course, you know, one of the first things I have to do each morning is look at the raw footage that has been sent by the local journalists who are working with us. And that can be really harrowing. As you mentioned, Israeli restrictions on media prevent you from reporting from Gaza, but you've been monitoring events very closely.

What have you been hearing from Palestinians and people in Gaza about the food situation and humanitarian situation over the past 11 weeks?

So since this full Israeli blockade was introduced, it was way back on the 2nd of March, with Israel saying that was to pressure Hamas into giving up the remaining hostages it's holding. We've had the situation sort of getting worse week by week. Quite soon we had the UN and others saying that their warehouses were empty, they weren't able to give out any food parcels anymore as they had been doing. And, you know, people told us that...

in the past week or so that if they got any food, it was like one meal a day. And even if you had money at the beginning, you know, there were some people who could afford the exorbitant prices on the market for the small amount of vegetables that can still be grown in Gaza, the small amount of fish that fishermen were able to get. And, you know,

Then, really, we saw that very little has been available at all in the past few days. People talk about there just being rice, lentils and pasta. And I have to say, from watching this footage that I do, it's very noticeable that a lot of people look extremely thin. They look gaunt.

Yolande, let's actually pause for a moment and hear about what it's like on the ground in Gaza. This is Dr. Ibrahim Sharif Alashi, a dentist who works there. The famine in Gaza is spreading every moment. I have seen patients come to our medical point with nothing in their stomach for days. And the mothers are unable to feed their children, yes.

I have personally seen many of these heartbreaking cases with my own eyes every day. New born babies just a day or two old come to hospital and their mother are unable to breastfeed them because they themselves are malnutritioned and weak. There is no baby formula available. And off the back of that, we should point out that it's not just food.

There have been chronic shortages of water in Gaza for some time, and desalination plants have been vital in converting seawater into fresh water for drinking. But Israel has shut off the power to those plants, so they're really relying on fuel to power them, and that's in very short supply. This is Fida Al-Araj. She works for Oxfam in Gaza. She spoke to the BBC about the impact of not having enough clean water. Yeah, it's really, really difficult. Like, it

It's our first concern every day, every single day. So you just store water as much as possible. And of course, it doesn't last you for very long. People are...

are already using water that's not 100% of a good quality or 100% desalinated or purified. So we see like outbreaks of diarrhea with the children. There is like a panic. There is a huge concern of the shortage of water. Like you can cope for a few days, for example, but beyond that, it's out of your hands. It's not something that you can cope with. So

So Yolande, in recent days, Israel has allowed some aid deliveries to resume. What do we know about what's gotten through in the last few days? So about 200 lorries have gone through in just the past couple of days after Israel eased its blockade and allowed the UN to operate. So we think what's gone through is things like flour, baby food, medical supplies. You mentioned flour there, and I just want to pick up on that.

This is a clip of Imad Kudeh. He's a student currently working in Khan Yunis. That's in southern Gaza. He described people's reactions getting some bread today. The WFP party started to distribute some bread between the displaced people here. This is really good. So the management of the camps here started to receive it from the bakeries in the area. The smile was really clear in the faces of the people receiving this kind of bread because it's a long time no see.

Yolande, is there any sense of how much aid is getting in versus what's actually needed? I mean, the UN has said that this is just a drop in the ocean because over 11 weeks, if you imagine that all UN agencies, other humanitarian organizations basically saw their storage warehouses in Gaza emptying out. You know, they have given a sense that what's really needed is to flood communities.

Gaza with aid. And in order to do that, they're talking about something like 600 lorry loads of aid would be needed to go in each day, which is what we saw in the ceasefire earlier this year. So more is needed, but getting those vital supplies into Gaza, that comes with plenty of challenges. This is Amani Al-Nauk. She's an aid worker from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and she's currently in the territory. She sent us this message earlier today.

The needs in Gaza are not only related to food. In one camp, they range from baby milk to diapers to food to medicines, medical equipment, oil, fuel, pipes for repairing water networks and clothes. A trickle of trucks is not enough to cover all these needs.

and active evacuation orders make people move from one area into another. This also makes it difficult for aid workers to distribute aid safely and effectively. They must keep remapping where people are centered and what their emerging needs are. Yolande, there were delays over these recent deliveries and aid agencies have said they're worried about safe passage. Can you explain what those concerns are?

So there are two aspects to that, really. First of all, in order for...

The UN, to send lorries, this is the system that's required, to go and pick up the supplies that come from the Israeli side of the main crossing, they have to go into an Israeli militarised zone. And the UN's humanitarian office told us that some of the drivers, its teams on the ground inside Gaza, were waiting hours at a time for a green light to be given by the Israeli military. And that, you know, didn't come immediately.

Then the other aspect is the very real concern about looting by desperate people and armed gangs too, which still operate. As you mentioned there, safety is a major concern for aid agencies when they're distributing aid in Gaza. Here's Claire Manara from the humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, who's currently working in Gaza. She sent us this message on Wednesday on the difficulties that her team is facing.

We're going to have trucks come in that we need to drive through an absolutely desperate population and for sure it's not going to be safe because the population, they're absolutely on the brink of their coping mechanisms. So we don't know how we can drive safely through these populations that are in desperate need and we know that they will be wanting to loot the supplies that we have on the way where

We're only being allowed to use certain routes around Gaza, certain roads, and they're the roads that we know are not safe because they're driving through the huge populations of displaced people that are sleeping on the ground. Yolande, was there a specific impetus for Israel allowing aid back in? Was it the result of international backlash?

I mean, very much so. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, gave a statement partly to address criticism from hardliners in his own government because they wanted the blockade to stay in place. And the prime minister said that the decision was made under pressure from Israel's allies. He said that some had told him we can't handle images of mass starvation. And warnings started to come through from the UN and others that using starvation as a weapon of war does amount to a war crime condition.

Looking forward, Israel has said that it wants to set up with the U.S. their own aid delivery that would be done through American companies in Gaza, sort of bypassing the U.N. and other aid suppliers. Could you tell us more about that plan?

Yeah, so the accusation that's come from Israel consistently is that Hamas has been stealing aid, although Hamas has denied that. And the UN and other aid groups have said that they do have these strong mechanisms to supervise the aid that they've brought into the Gaza Strip. But because of these ongoing issues, they're...

Israel and the U.S. have backed the idea of having this new organization. It's meant to start work in Gaza by the end of May, and it would oversee a sort of new model of aid distribution. And that would be going initially out of four or five distribution sites in the south of the Strip.

They're saying that they would be backed up by private security companies, that the Israeli military would remain in the periphery, and there would be a screening of individuals that would be allowed, one person representing each family that would be allowed in to take aid from these different sites. But that has proved extremely controversial. Has the United Nations offered comment on that?

I mean, they have said basically that this is unethical and unworkable. Unethical, they said it doesn't adhere to their humanitarian principles, that aid should be independently and fairly given. They've said that this looks like a kind of

in order to force people, because these distribution sites would mainly be in the south, to push people to leave the north, which is where most of the population of Gaza currently is. These secure distribution sites are just a fraction of the number that...

The UN currently has been operating out of 400 distribution sites across the Gaza Strip. There was a statement by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation itself that said the aim was to complement the work that the UN has been doing. But the way it was previously presented by the Israeli authorities is that it would

replace the work of the UN and other aid groups unless they cooperated with it. And they have made clear that they would not do that. So we know some aid is now getting through, but do we know how long they will allow the trucks to get in? Well, what the UN agencies have told us that under the agreement that was negotiated, they were given officially only five days because the

Israeli authorities were saying that they wanted them to come in to bridge a gap before they could have this newly created Gaza humanitarian foundation taking over the aid operations. But from what we've been hearing, that is just not realistic that the new aid distribution system will be up and running so quickly. Yolande Nell, the BBC's Middle East correspondent. Thank you so much for explaining that. Thank you. It was great to talk to you.

The Israeli government and Hamas are continuing to negotiate a ceasefire, but it's not clear whether these talks will lead to a breakthrough. If you're a regular listener, you'll know that we've been following this story since October 7th. You can find our other episodes on the Israel-Gaza conflict wherever you're listening to this, and of course, we'll continue to update you. That's all for today. I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. We'll see you again soon. ♪

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