A first-hand look at Gaza’s controversial food-distribution sites

THOUSANDS STOOD in the sweltering sun, watched over by an Israeli tank, in a long queue snaking south from the second-largest city in the Gaza Strip. They had walked for miles to reach a food-distribution centre on the outskirts of Khan Younis. As the crowd grew, the American mercenaries who guarded the entrance to the compound fired into the air. They began handing out cardboard boxes, each containing flour, pasta, oil, and other dry goods calculated to last a family for a week. Those who had received their boxes quickly emptied them into white sacks and left.

After a few minutes the guards tried to let a group of women join the front of the queue. The crowd surged forward and broke into the compound. When tear-gas grenades failed to stop the surge of desperate people, the guards stopped handing out boxes and closed the centre.

These scenes, observed by The Economist on July 15th during a short embedded visit to an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) observation post overlooking the distribution centre, have been recurring for nearly two months. Often, they have resulted in multiple casualties, many of them by IDF fire. The day after the visit, on July 16th, at least 20 people queuing for food were killed in a stampede at the same site.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which began distributing food at four centres in south and central Gaza in May, confirmed the deaths. It says it has “credible reason” to believe that Hamas, the Islamist movement that still controls parts of Gaza, sent people who “deliberately fomented the unrest”. The foundation denies firing tear-gas into the crowd.

After 21 months of war, at least half of Gaza’s population of 2.1m is now concentrated in Khan Younis and in the tents and shacks of the “humanitarian zone” nearby in al-Mawasi, next to the Mediterranean Sea. The rest remain in what is left of Gaza City and a few smaller towns to the north. On the Egyptian border, Rafah, once a city of more than 200,000 people, has all but been razed to the ground by Israeli bombs and bulldozers.

The IDF denies claims by Palestinian health authorities and UN agencies that some 700 Gazans have been killed around the distribution centres, saying that these numbers were “intentionally inflated”. IDF soldiers interviewed by Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper, say they were given orders to fire at crowds trying to get to the centres. A senior IDF officer says there had been “misfires” and procedures had been reviewed but denies his forces used live fire to control crowds.

The IDF calls the GHF distribution centres a “success story”. It claims the centres have wrested control over food supplies from Hamas, which Israel says used to control supplies provided by international aid groups before it banned most of them from bringing food into the strip. Israel says this has reduced Hamas’s ability to make money and weakened the group’s hold on Gaza’s population.

International aid organisations, including the UN, deny their supplies were controlled by Hamas and have refused to co-operate with the GHF, which they say violates basic humanitarian principles. Israel has also allowed local clans, some of which are also criminal groups, to receive their own food supplies. It claims these groups “challenge Hamas control”.

Indirect talks in Doha between Israel and Hamas about a temporary ceasefire, which could perhaps lead to an end to the war, have yet to produce a breakthrough. One of Hamas’s demands in the talks is that the GHF centres be closed and other aid groups put back in charge of food distribution. The IDF says that shows the centres are serving their purpose. ■