CNN
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Thousands of Palestinians will overlook the newly established aid site in South Gaza on Tuesday. This is part of a new controversial Israeli and US-approved aid distribution mechanism that began Tuesday after months of lockdowns.
Videos from the distribution site of Teru Al Sultan, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), showed that it appears to raid the facility, demolish parts of the fencing, and climb barriers designed to control the flow of the crowd.
The diplomats called chaos on this site are “surprising to anyone.”
The 11-week Israeli lockdown on humanitarian aid has led the Enclave population to starve more than 2 million Palestinians, deepening the humanitarian crisis, and the initial reopening of humanitarian aid has resumed last week’s besieged enclave.
“The GHF teams have retreated as a small number of Gazans can safely be assisted and dissipated. This was done in accordance with GHF protocols to avoid casualties,” the GHF said. Security sources said the US security contractor on the ground did not fire the shots and that operation will resume at the site on Wednesday.
The Israeli Defense Force said their troops fired warning shots in areas outside the compound, and the situation was controlled. They refused to carry out the air fire towards the property.
“What we warned was a huge mistake,” said Amjad Al Shawa, director of the Palestinian network of non-governmental organizations.
“If Israel believes that this distribution method works through hunger that violates this blockade and humanitarian principles, they are wrong.”
GHF said it has distributed around 8,000 food boxes so far, serving a total of 462,000 meals in Gaza. They say the meal flow increases daily. And it aims to reach 1.2 million to 60% of Gaza’s population by the end of the weekend.
The GHF claimed it began operation on Monday, but pictures of the organization showed only those carrying boxes of aid, with pallets of boxes sitting in an empty lot.
GHF is preparing three additional sites for the distribution of aid. Two of them are located in southern Gaza and the other in central Gaza. All sites in the south are in areas that fell under a large evacuation order a day ago.
Northern Gaza does not have distribution sites, the point of criticism from many aid experts. The UN has previously warned that, as Israeli Defense Minister Katz said earlier this month, is seen as encouraging Israel’s publicly stated goal of enforcing the “wide Gazan population” from northern Gaza.
“This mechanism appears to be virtually ineffective and incompatible with humanitarian principles, creating a risk of serious anxiety while not fulfilling Israel’s obligations under international law,” the United Nations Coordination Agency for Humanitarian Affairs wrote in a document obtained earlier this month by CNN.
The United Nations said Tuesday that Israel continues to deny permission to deliver food directly to Gaza families, but they are ready to enter the strip, with thousands of trucks ready to go. The United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) said, together with other humanitarian organisations, “distributes a meaningful amount of aid at the moment we are granted.”
“The amount of supplies allowed to enter the Gaza Strip is minimal, so it has not even reached families outside of one small area,” Unrwa said in a statement.
Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Aid Coordination Agency, called the GHF Aid Program “distracts from what is actually needed. This will encourage the reopening of all intersections in Gaza, promoting the safe environment within Gaza and the ease of all emergency supplies outside our borders and the fastest promotion of final approval.”
While Israel and the US had refused to name humanitarian organizations involved in the new controversial mechanism, GHF images showed a box labelled “Rahma Worldwide,” a Michigan-based nonprofit organization that says it “provides assistance and support to the world’s most vulnerable communities.”
This story has been updated.
