Aid Group Sees Considerable Risks in Rafah

Kate, before I I go into our conversation, I just want to confirm with you that you are humanitarian. You’re part of a humanitarian aired organization with actual people on the ground in Gaza. How many people do you have on the ground right now? That’s correct. We Mercy Corps has worked in Gaza since 1986 and as of October 7th we had 70 staff in country. As of now, we we have 40 remaining staff in country, mostly in and around Rafa. OK, so that is good context then, because we would like to hear from you about some of the difficulties of the aid passage into parts of Gaza. I was just speaking to my colleague Paul about Israel taking over the Adafa border crossing overnight. What are the implications on humanitarian aid and the passage of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip? Well, the there is massive implications. I mean, just by way of additional context, just to bring us forward to the moment that we’re facing right now after seven months of of bombardment and the total siege of Gaza, in which water, electricity, commercial supplies, most fuel has been cut off. You know we have 34,000 people who have been killed, 14,000 of which are children, and as of late March we had 1.1 million people who were in category 5 acute food insecurity, which basically means that they are actively facing famine. So this situation was already incredibly dire in the lead up to this week’s events and having the Rafa border crossing closed will only add fuel to that fire and make this far more difficult, not first, because people will have to move again. This is a limited incursion at this time of eastern Rafa, but it may develop into something much larger for all of the area of Rafa where over half of Gaza’s population had been sheltering in relative safety. So people will have to move, which I can get into in in a moment. But having the actual crossing closed and Karem Shalom closed means that no aid will be coming in, which will make the situation I just described far, far worse. Well, you talk about people having to flee or move to these so-called safe zones. How easy is it for the population to move around and actually get access to those safe zones? It’s not easy at all. Roughly 1.9 million people in Gaza have been actively displaced since the beginning of this crisis. And when I say displaced, I don’t mean one time some people have been displaced, including our staff, which you kindly asked about multiple times as the military activity has moved from the north through central Gaza and down to the South. So they are exhausted, they have limited means and they have, you know, limited resources to make this journey along what I might notice, also a perilous route. There’s a lot of unexploded ordinance in areas of Gaza that have already faced fighting. And if people make that journey, which is, which is very difficult as they described, they will arrive in areas of Alma Wasi and Con Yunus that have virtually no infrastructure, no clean water, no electricity, no real housing materials. So there won’t and there won’t be very many aid organizations there to greet them just because of these conditions. And so they are being pushed into a situation of incredible danger where we expect these hunger numbers to dramatically rise and the amount of communicable disease also to arise as people are crowded into areas where they have no health services. OK. Can I just ask you, as an organization, what are you advocating for at this point in time? But at this point in time, we’re unfortunately advocating for a lot of the things that we have advocated for since late October, which is a a durable, first and foremost a durable ceasefire in Gaza. And this is not from an ideological perspective, but from an operational perspective. It is impossible for aid organizations to safely deliver aid at scale to people who need it in Gaza without a cessation of hostilities. Also, the death count will continue to rise and the civilian and infrastructure will continue to be destroyed and pulverized as it has unless we see a durable ceasefire. And the reason I say durable is the diplomatic negotiations are sort of snagged right now, particularly on a point of how long that ceasefire would last. And while a temporary ceasefire would be very helpful in terms of a pause so aid can get in and people can have a break from this violence, we don’t want to also postpone the inevitable of a significant incursion in Rafa that would cause major damage from a humanitarian standpoint. So we don’t want to delay that. We want to make sure that undue harm does not come to people and and and that the suffering in Gaza doesn’t deepen. Lastly, we are asking for an end to to the siege of Gaza which has really been driving the humanitarian needs in country this whole time. So turning back on water, electricity, telecommunications and allowing commercial traffic, because no amount of humanitarian aid will ever be able to replace those basic necessities of life that existed before the events of October 7.