How Israel's Inspection Process Is Obstructing Aid Delivery. Senator Chris Van Hollen describes what he witnessed on the

[Nanjeanne]

Egypt-Gaza Border.

From The New Yorker:

Q&A

Last week, the Democratic senators Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen travelled to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt, the entry point for many of the aid trucks into the Gaza Strip. The humanitarian situation in Gaza, where more than twenty-three thousand people are estimated to have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, is extremely dire, and the number of trucks full of food and medicine and other vital goods is insufficient. As recently as Thursday, the United Nations reported that only a hundred and forty-five trucks entered Gaza through Rafah and Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, which is close to Rafah, but on the Israeli side; human-rights groups have stated that more than three times that many are required. Israel contends that aid trucks have to be closely scrutinized to insure that weapons are not being smuggled into Gaza, but after watching the inspection process at Rafah, Merkley and Van Hollen called the Israeli approach “arbitrary.”

SNIP

Why is it getting worse?

Well, it’s getting worse in terms of the level of hunger, and that is the result of people who’ve been denied access to the food they need for too long, and are not getting adequate levels of humanitarian supplies, as well as a dramatic reduction—it went down to zero in early December—of commercial trucks going through the crossings, and of course those trucks used to supply goods to the people of Gaza.

You also said that the inspection process was “arbitrary.” What does that mean in practice?

One of the things we witnessed personally was a large warehouse filled with humanitarian goods that had been rejected at Israeli inspection points. Goods like medical kits used to deliver babies, water-testing kits, water filters, solar-powered desalinization units, tents that people said might’ve been returned because they had metal poles.

So a whole collection of rejected items that seemed purely arbitrary. And I will also say that when one item on a truck is rejected, the entire truck is turned back, and in talking to a truck driver and others we learned that some of these trucks take twenty days to go from the starting point to delivering assistance. So when I say, “a whole truck is turned back,” it goes all the way back to the beginning of the process.

SNIP

I want to return to your trip to the Rafah border crossing. You’ve laid out what you thought the facts were, but what is your analysis of what is going on? Why was this inspection process like this?

Well, if I look at the totality of issues, it was clear that there was not sufficient will by Israeli authorities to address the scope and severity of the crisis, and you saw that in many different ways. I would just start on some major data points here, which is, it shouldn’t have taken so long to open the Kerem Shalom crossing. And we know that it wasn’t open because of a political decision by the Netanyahu government, that they did not want to see humanitarian goods transiting through Israeli territory to get to Palestinians in Gaza.

How do we know that?

I know that from conversations I’ve had with multiple people in the [Biden] Administration. And, of course, even today we’re trying to get the Erez crossing open. [The Erez crossing connects northern Gaza with Israel.] So those are some of the big data points when it comes to humanitarian assistance, and then there are all these other facts along the way: the fact that you have a broken deconfliction system within Gaza—I think we need a humanitarian timeout, but absent that you could still have a much better deconfliction process that reflects the way they’ve done it in other conflicts around the world—and again, all these obstacles that have been put in the way of getting goods into Gaza, including the arbitrary rejection of things like medical kits and water-testing kits.

SNIP

Highly recommend reading the whole very interesting article.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-israels-inspection-process-is-obstructing-aid-delivery]

[Lonestarblue]

1. No surprises here. Just deliberate slowdown of humanitarian aid.

[flying_wahini]

2. Sure seems like deliberate ways to kill as many as possible. Aka Mass extermination.

Babe’s guys are probably working on new plans for apt complexes as we speak.

[David__77]

3. I'm glad he spoke up about that. Much more is needed.

[GuppyGal]

4. I'm glad our allies still stood with us when dump was in office