After eight months of conflict, delivering aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip remains an insurmountable challenge. Alongside our efforts to advocate for a ceasefire, it also remains our top priority.   

Why is delivering aid to Gaza so difficult, and why aren’t the “tactical pauses of military activity” announced by Israel earlier this week making it easier?  

The answer is both simple and complex. As the occupying power, Israel is legally obligated to allow the entry of goods required to meet the basic needs of Gaza’s residents. In practice, however, Israeli authorities are restricting and delaying the supply of aid in myriad ways – to the point where people are starving to death while life-saving aid sits in trucks and warehouses just a couple of kilometers away on the other side of the border, waiting to be allowed in. Make no mistake: this deliberate hampering of humanitarian aid access is happening in full sight of the international community and in breach of international law.  

The key challenge, of course, is that entering Gaza in the first place is virtually impossible. There are only two border crossings offering very limited access, including Israeli-imposed limits to the number of trucks being allowed entry each day. The Rafah border crossing from Egypt has been closed for weeks. Once in Gaza, distributing aid is challenging due to the danger of the ongoing armed conflict, the destruction of roads, the lack of fuel and electricity, and the communications blackout. 

What you perhaps may not know about are the various other ways that Israel is deliberately preventing aid from entering Gaza. For example, by intentionally complicating the approval process, aid storage and transportation into Gaza. One such way is arbitrarily rejecting aid items that it considers “dual use,” that is to say, items that are civilian goods with potential military use; batteries, flashlights and medical supplies all fall into this category.  One of our partners had a shipment including wheelchairs and hearing aids for children denied.  

 Sometimes, items that have been rejected are later given pre-approval, a few examples include tank and bladder kits and hand-washing stands. We also regularly wait on authorities to pre-approve materials like water testing kits, sterilisers, deionisation packs, pH sensors, photometers and turbidity tubes. This process usually takes two to three weeks, but in some cases, it takes months. Case in point, a vital shipment of vital water quality testing equipment purchased as part of our water project for Gaza has not been able to cross into Gaza since December. Authorities don’t always offer specific reasons for rejection, and there is a total lack of transparency in the approval process, which results in more delays, paperwork, and extra costs.