Eleven-minute race for food: how aid points in Gaza became ‘death traps’ (www.theguardian.com)
from UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 22 Jul 16:37
https://lemmy.world/post/33324858

Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN.

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Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far.

First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. “You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,” he says. “You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.”

Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires.

Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF.

Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. “This is not humanitarian aid,” he says. “We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.”

#world