According to Qatar's Al Jazeera 17**, the people of the Gaza Strip have been forced to move to the south under the continuous bombardment of Israel, and the local humanitarian crisis continues to worsen. On December 17, local time, on the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing near the Egyptian border, hungry and desperate locals jumped onto aid trucks to grab food and other supplies.
Dozens of Palestinians intercepted the trucks after the humanitarian aid convoy drove through the Rafah crossing point, forcing some of them to stop, and then they climbed into the trucks, unloaded food and full boxes of drinking water, and removed them or dropped them to the crowd below, the report said.
Palestinians looting an aid truck Picture: AP.
According to the Times of Israel, the ** circulating on social platforms on the 17th showed that some trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt to the Gaza Strip were looted. The report mentioned that Israel approved a "temporary measure" on the 15th to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and an unnamed ICRC official in Egypt told AFP that "79 trucks began to enter" the Gaza Strip on the 17th.
However, the newspaper said that it does not appear that the trucks that appeared in these ** were through the Kerem Shalom crossing, because Israel only allowed aid from Egypt to pass through the crossing, and not from the United Nations. And in **, you can see that the goods on the truck are marked with the UAE flag. Other** appear to indicate that there was a rush for supplies dropped from the truck shortly after the truck passed through the Rafah crossing.
Hani Mahmoud, a correspondent for Al Jazeera in Rafah, said: "The humanitarian situation has become very desperate, not only for the residents of Rafah city, but also for the 1 million displaced Palestinians here. As the war dragged on, they became hungry and thirsty, and traumatized. ”
Mahmoud also said that the insufficient amount of aid allowed to be sent into the Gaza Strip has forced the Palestinian population into a "survival mode". "People have nothing, no shelter, no food, no water, no medical supplies......So the scene that happened at the Rafah crossing was a natural reaction: when people were dying of hunger, when they were hungry, we saw this happen. ”
Al Jazeera reported that UN agencies warned last week that people in Gaza had become so "desperately short of food" that they would intercept humanitarian aid convoys and immediately eat what they could find. Philippe Lazzarini, Director-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, who recently visited the Gaza Strip, said that despite the long suffering of the Gaza Strip's residents under Israeli siege, they have "never experienced" such levels of hunger.
Lazzarini said on the 14th, "I have seen with my own eyes that the people of Rafah, in a state of utter despair, began to decide to go directly to the truck and eat what they took from the truck on the spot. ”
Also on the 14th, the United Nations World Food Programme said that half of the 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip are starving as the Israeli army expands its ground offensive in the southern Gaza Strip.