Last month, hundreds of thousands of people returned to northern Gaza – where famine was declared in late August – but their access to food is “severely limited”, said Abeer Etefa, senior spokesperson for the World Food Program (WFP).PAM).
And while many returnees have found their homes in ruins, those displaced in the south “often live in tents and without access to food and services,” she warned.
Speaking from Cairo, Ms Etefa said that three and a half weeks into the fragile ceasefire, the WFP had distributed food parcels to around a million people across the Gaza Strip against a target of 1.6 million, as part of “the vast operation to reduce hunger in Gaza”.
“Supplies are still limited, so each family receives a reduced food ration, which corresponds to one parcel, or enough food for 10 days,” she explained.
To continue expanding our operations to the required level, “We really need more access, more border crossings opening and… more access to key routes inside Gaza”insisted the PAM spokesperson.
Humanitarian crossings still closed
UN Aid Coordination Office OCHA said Monday that no food aid convoys had reached the north via direct crossings since September 12.
“We still only have two operational border crossing points,” emphasized Ms. Etefa, referring to Kerem Shalom in the south of the enclave and Kissufim in central Gaza. “This significantly limits the amount of assistance that WFP and other agencies are able to provide to stabilize markets and meet the needs of the population,” she said, highlighting the fact that the continued closure of northern crossing points into the Gaza Strip means that aid convoys are forced to “follow a slow and difficult route from the south.”
The spokesperson for the UN food aid agency also said that some 700,000 people receive fresh bread daily through 17 WFP-supported bakeries, nine in southern and central Gaza and eight in the north, with the aim of reaching 25.
Speaking from Gaza, WFP communications manager Nour Hammad said that while witnessing “apocalyptic scenes” across the enclave, she also saw in people’s faces “the joy that the guns have fallen silent after all this time and the fear of whether the silence will last or not.”
She said Gaza residents compared the destruction caused by more than two years of war to “the aftermath of an earthquake.”
“This help is important”
“In all the distribution points I have visited in the Gaza Strip in recent days, people tell me one thing: this aid is important,” she said. After months spent “surviving on scraps, rationing food, spreading a meal over several days”, people finally have access to “fresh bread, food parcels, cash transfers, nutrition and support”.
“This is where the path to recovery begins,” she emphasized.
While 200,000 of the most vulnerable people now receive digital cash payments to “supplement food baskets with fresh produce” from local markets, prices there remain prohibitive.
“Food is slowly returning to the shelves, but prices remain out of reach for families, given that they have exhausted their resources to survive two years of war,” Ms. Hammad said. “Today, for example, I buy an apple at the price of a kilo before the war,” she explains.
The fragility of the ceasefire and aid flows are at the center of people’s concerns, Ms. Hammad said, recounting the story of a displaced mother she met in Gaza City. Even though the woman is receiving aid, she warned her children against eating the rations right away because “she cannot believe that tomorrow we will also bring food,” the WFP communicator said.
“Families invite us into their tents… exhausted from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, and they want to show us their reality. And their reality is that people need food. People need shelter, people need warm clothes because winter is coming and they need continued support,” she concluded.
Publicado anteriormente en Almouwatin.
