Far too little food and other types of aid are entering Gaza, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing aid agencies, as Israel continues to violate a key part of the ceasefire deal.
Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel pledged to immediately allow the “commencement of full entry of humanitarian aid and relief” at a minimum consistent with the January 2025 ceasefire deal, under which Israel agreed to allow 600 aid trucks to enter Gaza per day.
Gaza’s Media Office said on Saturday that since the ceasefire deal went into effect on October 10, an average of 145 aid trucks have entered per day. The UN’s World Food Program has said that just half of the needed food has been coming in, and, according to Reuters, Palestinian aid groups say overall aid volumes were between a quarter and a third of the expected amount.
The WFP has said it has opened 44 food distribution points in Gaza, far short of its goal of 145. Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the WFP, told reporters on Tuesday that just two border crossings into Gaza are open to aid deliveries, and none are open in northern Gaza, meaning Israel is not fulfilling its commitment to allow the “full entry” of humanitarian aid.
“We need full access. We need everything to be moving fast. We are in a race against time. The winter months are coming. People are still suffering from hunger, and the needs are overwhelming,” Etefa said. “The majority of households that we’ve spoken to are only consuming cereals, pulses, dry food rations, which people cannot survive on for a long time. Meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits are being consumed extremely rarely.”
Palestinians living in the rubble of Gaza are also facing a shortage of shelter as not enough tents have entered the Strip, and older ones are wearing out as winter is approaching. Khalid al-Dahdouh, a father of five who returned to Gaza City to find his home in ruins, told Al Jazeera that he built a shelter for his family using bricks salvaged from the rubble, held together with mud.
“We tried to rebuild because winter is coming,” al-Dahdouh said. “We don’t have tents or anything else, so we built a primitive structure out of mud since there is no cement … It protects us from the cold, insects and rain – unlike the tents.”
The US is reportedly pushing a plan to allow reconstruction in Gaza only in the areas that are occupied by the Israeli military, an idea that has faced pushback from Arab states due to concerns that splitting the Strip in two could lead to a permanent Israeli occupation.
