Border Closures Impede Aid to Gaza, Sparking Humanitarian Crisis

Amid persistent calls from the United States and other countries that Israel needs to make it easier for life-saving aid to reach Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military closed two of the region’s few operating border crossings in Rafah, a southern Gazan city, on May 7, 2024.

Responding to political pressure and alarm, Israel then reopened a different border crossing into Gaza, called Kerem Shalom, on May 8.

These border crossings are crucial for aid workers and deliveries of food, fuel and other supplies, especially as commercial imports have stopped entering Gaza. The amount of aid going into Gaza each day has varied since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. But the overall number of aid trucks flowing through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings is down 75% from before the war, according to the United Nations. Aid workers say they are unable to meet Palestinians’ needs in Gaza, even with the aid air drops and boat shipments that the U.S. and other countries are doing.

I spent 20 years as the president of Oxfam America, an international humanitarian organization, and have overseen humanitarian responses to some of the biggest crises of the past three decades, from the war in Kosovo to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know from experience that the major aid organizations know how to run large, well-integrated operational responses to emergencies like Gaza. However, this is not happening, in part because Israel is not giving aid groups what they need to do so.

The Needs in Gaza

After seven months of conflict, the international community has not set up the kind of well-coordinated response it would normally provide during a crisis.

There are several reasons why enough aid deliveries are not quickly entering Gaza. First, Israel controls all of the border crossings into Gaza and does intensive searches of trucks for security reasons, slowing down the deliveries. Even if aid does cross into Gaza, it does not mean the goods will reach people in need.

There have also been reports of people dying and being injured when trying to collect aid packages that are air-dropped, as well as Hamas and other groups intercepting aid deliveries and either hoarding the items or selling them at high prices on the black market.

In early May, northern Gaza passed a critical threshold and is now entering into a “full blown famine,” according to the United Nations.

Bombings in Gaza have destroyed water and energy systems, leaving 95% of the population without access to clean water.

There’s a fairly standard playbook for how aid organizations respond to humanitarian crises like the one playing out in Gaza. In most cases, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a designated U.N. office that focuses on humanitarian affairs and is typically called OCHA, takes the lead in defining what exactly different U.N. agencies should do to help people in a crisis.

The World Health Organization, World Food Program and other U.N. agencies all have their own specialties – be it health, housing, hunger, education or other issues. The U.N. agencies coordinate their work, while OCHA also assigns an international nonprofit organization to help each U.N. agency share their workload with other international and local nonprofits.

In most emergencies, there is clear coordination among international aid agencies from day one. This is a well-oiled machine with decades of experience in meeting people’s immediate needs in some of the world’s most challenging circumstances.

Aid Work in Gaza Is Different

However, Gaza does not align with this typical system of aid work.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or simply UNRWA, has been the main U.N. agency that has been focused only on providing a full suite of services to Palestinians since the late 1940s, when Israel was created and many Palestinians were pushed out into what are now the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Over the years, UNRWA’s role has evolved from meeting Palestinians’ basic needs for food and water, for example, to also providing health care and education. While other U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization work in Gaza, UNRWA is by far the largest aid organization there — and after Hamas is the second-largest employer in Gaza.

Both the Israeli and Egyptian governments have long recognized UNRWA as the main coordinator for trans-border aid shipments, especially those for other U.N. agencies and nonprofits that work with it.

While the UNRWA was accustomed to operating a large humanitarian operation in Gaza before the war, the agency is not equipped or staffed to help provide housing for the more than 1.7 million people in Gaza who have had to flee their homes.

Additionally, Israel and the UNRWA have a long, complicated relationship that came to a peak in March 2024, when Israel said that it would stop working with the agency altogether because of allegations —which have not been independently verified — that UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and held hostages captive.

Israel no longer working with the UNRWA creates new logistical challenges that prevent a coherent, organized humanitarian response in Gaza. This may force other U.N. agencies to suddenly take over UNRWA’s long-established roles in Gaza.

Border Closings and Other Challenges

Israel’s intermittent closing of border crossings into Gaza – and continued long delays for arriving aid trucks – is another crucial factor that is hampering aid delivery.

Aid experts also say that the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, which in May 2024 reached an average of 180 per day through the two main crossing points combined, is inadequate to address the hunger crisis.

Achieving what’s actually needed, they say, would require many more trucks, an influx of aid workers, training of Palestinian medical personnel to treat people suffering from malnutrition and gastrointestinal diseases, the restoration of medical facilities and, above all, an end to the military conflict.

Meanwhile, international nonprofits and their staff are facing their own safety challenges. At least 224 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Indiscriminate bombings of residential neighborhoods have forced other aid workers to move their families multiple times to find safety and shelter, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.

Possible Reforms

I think there are certain things that the U.N. could do to help make it easier for aid deliveries to reach people in Gaza.

First, OCHA could step in to better coordinate all of the relevant U.N. agencies that may need to join or take on a larger role in the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

I also think that the U.N. could insist that Israel help create safe and secure conditions for a well-coordinated and comprehensive U.N. response. This includes guarantees to open additional border crossings as needed, and increase the number of daily aid deliveries — especially food — as well as ensuring more consistent access and supplies.

Professional humanitarians are prepared to sacrifice ourselves to preserve and protect the dignity of all, both Israelis and Palestinians. History has taught that the only lesson from all wars is that no one really wins and millions suffer quietly well into the future.

Humanitarians’ job is to find and create safe spaces and save as many lives as we can, with the experience and resources at our disposal. We carry no weapons and rely entirely on respect for international humanitarian law and other rules of war to ensure our safety as we carry out this dangerous mission. But in order to carry out this work, we need access and minimally safe and secure conditions that let us do our jobs.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The post I’ve Spent Decades Overseeing Relief Operations Around the World, and Here’s What’s Going Wrong In Gaza appeared first on DCReport.org.

and for your patience, you get this historical bonus cartoon from the archives of Robert Crumb, from back in the 80s when TFG was just getting started with his insanity. Tip of the hat to Half Empty for the share.

What was adult film star Stormy Daniels doing on the stand for a second day in a criminal trial about Donald Trump falsifying New York state business records?  She may have been called by the prosecution, but it was Trump’s lawyers who put her there, Judge Juan Merchan said today. 

The exchange came in a hearing after testimony today when Merchan denied a second motion for a mistrial by the defense based on prejudicial testimony by Stormy Daniels.  Merchan took time to tell Trump’s lawyers that he went back over Stormy’s testimony on Tuesday, as well as their opening statement. “You denied that there was ever a sexual encounter between Stormy Daniels and the defendant,” Merchan told Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, so it was the defense that opened the door to her testimony and the “messy details” they object to, such as her statement that Trump refused to wear a condom during sex. 

Additionally, Merchan found that the defense did not object to the “messy details” when they were revealed in direct testimony during questioning by the prosecution, so the testimony they failed to object to cannot now be used as grounds for a mistrial.  Judge Merchan even said he could not figure “why on earth” Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, had not objected to the question that elicited the “messy detail” about the missing condom.

Today’s testimony by Stormy Daniels did not go well for the defense.  Trump lawyer Necheles spent nearly an hour comparing and contrasting Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday with interviews she had given previously, like the one she gave to gossip magazine “In Touch” in 2010.  She accused Daniels of making up the story about sex with Trump in the Lake Tahoe hotel in 2006.  Daniels replied that if she had made it up, “I would have written it to be a lot better.”  In another exchange, Necheles challenged Daniels about her account of the sex with Trump saying that as a porn actress, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.” 

Daniels responded that “the sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”  That ended that line of questioning.

Another line of questioning that went flat was when Necheles challenged Daniels about how she had monetized her relationship with Trump by writing a book and selling a votive candle with an illustration of herself depicted as a saint.  Daniels responded that her attempts to make money with branded products and her strip club tour were “not unlike Mr. Trump,” bringing that line of questioning to a quick close.  The prosecution later called two publishing executives to read into the record from Trump’s books his claims of how much money he made monetizing the Trump brand and how he vowed to always exact revenge on anyone who “betrayed” him, clearly implying that Daniels was Trump’s victim, not the other way around.

The unasked question that hung over the courtroom throughout the testimony of Stormy Daniels and during Judge Merchan’s denial of Trump’s motion for a mistrial was, if Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 in a Lake Tahoe hotel room, why did he have his lawyer pay her $130,000 and have her sign a non-disclosure agreement about what happened between them?

Until the trial for the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll in which the judge found that under common definitions of the term, Donald Trump had raped her, and this trial, when Stormy Daniels has been able to get her story about her sexual encounter with Trump on the permanent record, Trump has gotten away with his practice of “deny, deny, deny.” 

This time, by causing his lawyers to “deny, deny, deny” that he had a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, he exposed the truth not only to the world, but to a Manhattan jury that will now have to decide who to believe:  Donald Trump, who has relied on his lawyers to deny the story, or a very smart and credible witness who parried every attempt by those same lawyers to poke holes in her story.

The prosecution is nearing the end of its case.  They will call a few more witnesses to establish the facts of how Trump falsified his business records, and then they will call his former lawyer, Michael Cohen.  Jurors have already heard an audio tape of Trump and Cohen discussing making a payoff to Playboy model Karen McDougal, and Cohen is sure to be a deadly witness who will provide more details of the payoff to Stormy Daniels. 

Maybe Michael Cohen will answer the question about why Trump found it necessary to pay off Stormy Daniels to buy her silence, because it’s a sure thing that a stone-faced and silent Donald Trump won’t take the stand to do it.

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In an appallingly authoritarian move, Israel has ordered Al Jazeera to shutter its offices in the country. The network, Israel says, poses a national security threat. This seems to be the first time Israel has shut down an international news network, and it is doing so in the midst of a war in Gaza — a war that Israel has made exceedingly difficult for foreign news outlets to cover. Al Jazeera is far from a perfect news source, to put it mildly. But they are also the foreign outlet doing the most in-depth, round-the-clock, on-the-ground coverage of this war. And whatever you think of their coverage or how their Qatari ownership influences it, it is profoundly undemocratic and, yes, authoritarian to shut down an entire news network because you’re unhappy with how they’ve covered your war. Israel’s arguments that Al Jazeera has put their soldiers at risk, is a Hamas mouthpiece, and is an “incitement network” simply do not justify their actions here.

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Al Jazeera, like many news networks, is a bit of a mixed bag. Many, many of their journalists have reported bravely and admirably through this war and others. Al Jazeera’s coverage of this war has been non-stop, and while I can’t find numbers, the network does seem to have many more journalists on the ground in Gaza than any other foreign news outlet. Israel has been absolutely atrocious about giving journalists necessary access to cover this war, something dozens of the world’s most prominent journalists have publicly objected to. Government actions, and particularly wars, carried out without oversight are ripe for abuses. While camera phones and social media can create something of a check, there are real limitations: “citizen journalists” simply don’t have the credibility that institutional ones do; random social media videos can be said to be any number of things, and disinformation campaigns have been rampant during this war; and in the intensity of conflict, it’s not always possible to tell exactly what one is even seeing, which is why journalistic institutions check and double-check various claims and should only publish what they can confirm. During this war, Al Jazeera journalists have time and again been the only reporters around. Their work has been brave and essential.

This is not the first time Al Jazeera has been targeted by governments. In the past, others in the neighborhood, including Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, have at various times banned the network for reasons similar to those Israel gave: threats to national security, pushing a Qatari agenda, trafficking in bias and misinformation.

Al Jazeera is a Qatari outlet, and while it claims total independence from the government, those claims have at times seemed shaky. Its coverage of this war has been exceedingly hostile to Israel (to be clear, some other outlets have been exceedingly deferential to Israel — bias is not confined to Al Jazeera) and the network has, in my opinion, sometimes been far too deferential and even sympathetic to Hamas, a pattern its engaged in with other fundamentalist groups over the years. I’ve been pretty stunned by the behavior of several Al Jazeera journalists on social media, who don’t seem beholden by many of the same rules of engagement as reporters at, say, the New York Times. I’ve observed many instances of Al Jazeera reporters sharing totally unverified information, using wildly incendiary language, and refusing to adhere to even the most basic standards of journalistic fairness — stuff that would get any reporter fired from a reputable outlet in the US (although probably not from a Fox News, or from an op/ed page). The network has at times veered into the flagrant antisemitic, including Holocaust denial.

Much more often, though, the issue seems to be clear bias rather than blatant bigotry. That said, the network’s center of gravity and its audience is not New York and New York liberals, it’s the Arab world, and their reporting, coverage, and perspective reflect all of that. What seems fair in my eyes is not the One True Definition of fairness, and what seems biased is also defined by where I sit in the world. I have bigger concerns about their transparency and accountability. Al Jazeera has gotten several big, important stories wrong in its coverage of this war, which is not all that unusual given the circumstances (I don’t think any outlet has been correct 100% of the time), but they are not always particularly great at issuing public corrections and retractions, which is a real problem. I’m not particularly confident in their fact-checking procedures or their corrections procedures. I would not make Al Jazeera my sole source of information about this war or anything else. But as one of many sources, they’re an important one. And again, they are a huge and sprawling network, employing hundreds of exceptionally honest, exceptionally talented, exceptionally brave reporters who have been on the front lines of the current conflict, and who have covered many important stories with depth and integrity.

Also: None of that is really material to the matter at hand. I present it only to say that I’m not making this argument because I’m a huge Al Jazeera fan with no qualms about their journalism; I’m making it as a matter of principle, not personal preference.

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It is very, very easy and very, very common in moments of national crisis to cede one’s values in response to what feels like an acute threat. Those of us in the US have certainly seen this play out many times, from McCarthyism to Japanese internment to the “you’re with us or you’re against us” insanity of the post-9/11 era to the invasion of Iraq. Over and over again, the times when we suspend our principles out of fear wind up being among the ugliest and most regrettable moments in our histories.

Israel has become far less democratic since the rise of the broader Israeli right and the empowerment of Benjamin Netanyahu and his greater coalition of extremists, religious fundamentalists, and power-hungry autocrats. But Israel does still fancy itself a democracy even as it behaves less and less like one, and I imagine most people who care about its future, the wellbeing of its citizens, and the wellbeing of its neighbors very much hope it corrects from its current course. Banning a news network, even in the name of national security, is from the autocrat’s playbook, not the democrat’s.

Israel should also want to have the Arab world’s ear. Al Jazeera, for all its flaws, is a bridge — and the network does give Israeli spokespeople and the government their say. Shutting them down and raiding their offices may be a satisfying power play for reactionaries, but it doesn’t set the country on the path to what should be long-term goals: Regional normalization and peaceful coexistence.

Those goals, of course, may not be shared by Netanyahu, who seems primarily interested in staying out of jail and maintaining his grip on power. But what’s best for Bibi, it turns out, is often what’s very much not what’s best for his country.

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You don’t have to like Al Jazeera to support the network’s right to work in Israel, and in any other self-styled free and open democratic country (and in autocratic ones, too). There are a great many news outlets around the world that I think are deeply biased, bordering on dangerous, and sometimes crossing that border. But I also overwhelmingly think it’s a mistake to hand leaders the power to shut news outlets down. And it’s especially dangerous to see Israel shutting down Al Jazeera in the middle of a war in which Al Jazeera journalists have had better access than reporters from any other international network — in part because of Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock coverage of the war, and in part because Israel will simply not let most foreign journalists into Gaza to do their jobs.

Israel is now beginning its incursion into Rafah. There are not enough journalists on the ground. War, always, is hell. But it stands to reason that things get much more hellish if no watchdogs are watching.

xx Jill

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Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.

It's called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic – by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.

The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.

Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed.

This is my weekly Salon column. To read the rest of it, follow the link below:

All-expenses-paid-for Aileen Cannon

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