*A veteran humanitarian on what it will take to feed civilians in the region.* by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, March 14, 2024 https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-bidens-floating-pier-is-unlikely-to-meet-gazas-needs [full text furthest below] . . . *To learn more about Biden’s plan, I recently spoke by phone with Sean Carroll, the president and C.E.O. of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), an organization that provides humanitarian assistance on the ground in Gaza. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the pier idea is likely to be insufficient, why the recent airdrops of food did not meet expectations, and how Carroll’s staff in Gaza is providing food for starving families <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/gaza-is-starving>.*
*As someone who does humanitarian work in this area, how do you understand this Biden Administration plan to get more aid into Gaza?* I think it’s a couple of things. So much aid is needed. There’s such a massive gap. This is a well-intentioned effort to get more aid in, and all efforts are needed. There need to be more land crossings, and then there’ll need to be sea crossings, and eventually heavy equipment coming in. But it’s also a distraction and a bit alarming. If you’re feeling like you can negotiate only a few things at a time, then maybe you take your eyes and your attention off the land crossings. But there are hundreds of trucks sitting in Rafah. There’s probably somewhere between twenty to fifty times what that first boat is going to bring in, and it is sitting in trucks at the border <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-israels-inspection-process-is-obstructing-aid-delivery> . . . . *You mentioned sixty days, or two months, to build this, which is what the Pentagon has suggested. I imagine there are still a lot of logistics to get ships supplied with food.* That’s right. José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen move faster than anybody does. He told me back in October that he was going to bring a boat, and they had done it in Ukraine, but look how long it took. . . . *The Biden Administration has said that this pier plan would be temporary, but I’ve also heard the argument that this pier could actually be helpful to Gaza in the long term because it’s going to need a tremendous amount of aid for a very long time.* Yes, it could be helpful. I think the important question, though, with a long-term viewpoint is: What Gaza are we talking about? Are we talking about a Gaza that is part of a two-state solution, where Palestinians can return to their homes, and where it’s connected to the West Bank? Or are we talking about another expulsion of Palestinians, and Israel occupies and sells land for settlements? What is the pier rebuilding? That’s key. . . . *I don’t know if you want to share the name or any information about your employee who died, but if you want to share anything, any stories, how that happened, feel free.* His name is Mousa Shawwa. He was a longtime employee, he was our logistics coördinator—very loved, a great family man, absolutely loved his family, loved his youngest son, Karim, who’s in critical condition now. He’s not expected to make it. We’re trying to do everything we can so that he can make it. The Israelis had had the coördinates of the house they were staying in. We had given it to them at least twice, including a few days before the attack. We don’t think that he was targeted, but we do know that the Israelis knew he was there. He was there when the bomb hit, and he died. We’re still trying to get more info, but, like other N.G.O.s, we’re very, very worried. It feels to our staff like they’re being targeted, or at least they’re not being kept safe, and they’re worried for their families. We can talk all we want about temporary piers and airdrops and more land crossings, but if there aren’t people on the inside who can safely deliver . . . and that’s why the ceasefire is so important. If a Rafah operation happens, I just can’t imagine how anything survives. ♦ # # # FULL TEXT During his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden announced a plan to build a temporary pier off the coast of the Gaza Strip, to allow for a “massive increase” in much-needed humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians. Biden’s announcement came after he repeatedly expressed frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-this-the-end-of-the-netanyahu-era>’s government over its refusal to allow sufficient aid into Gaza <https://www.newyorker.com/tag/gaza> even as the Administration continues to provide Israel with military assistance. Just how such a plan would work remains unclear, and the Department of Defense, which is in charge of the construction, has said that it could take up to sixty days to build the pier. The need for supplies is urgent: children in Gaza have begun to die from malnutrition, and, since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of the territory on October 7th, an estimated seventy-three thousand Palestinians have been injured and thirty-one thousand have been killed. To learn more about Biden’s plan, I recently spoke by phone with Sean Carroll, the president and C.E.O. of American Near East Refugee Aid (*ANERA*), an organization that provides humanitarian assistance on the ground in Gaza. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the pier idea is likely to be insufficient, why the recent airdrops of food did not meet expectations, and how Carroll’s staff in Gaza is providing food for starving families <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/gaza-is-starving>. *As someone who does humanitarian work in this area, how do you understand this Biden Administration plan to get more aid into Gaza?* I think it’s a couple of things. So much aid is needed. There’s such a massive gap. This is a well-intentioned effort to get more aid in, and all efforts are needed. There need to be more land crossings, and then there’ll need to be sea crossings, and eventually heavy equipment coming in. But it’s also a distraction and a bit alarming. If you’re feeling like you can negotiate only a few things at a time, then maybe you take your eyes and your attention off the land crossings. But there are hundreds of trucks sitting in Rafah. There’s probably somewhere between twenty to fifty times what that first boat is going to bring in, and it is sitting in trucks at the border <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-israels-inspection-process-is-obstructing-aid-delivery> . *How would you describe what the Administration is trying to do?* They are trying to open up a way to bring things in by sea in a situation where there is no seaport. There’s a small seaport in the north, which is really a fishing seaport, and it’s not deep enough for big ships. Of course, the infrastructure there, probably including the port, is pretty damaged. There was a port that was being constructed after the Oslo Accords, but Israel destroyed that, in 2000. It’s not deep sea; it’s shallow water there. The idea is to build a temporary pier so they can bring ships to a pier that’s out in the deeper water, and then [cargo] gets off-loaded onto smaller ships and brought to shore. *People in your line of work are saying that what remains most important is to open land crossings from Rafah and hopefully elsewhere. Why are these crossings considered the most efficient and easiest?* It’s just the cost per ton. Land crossings are drastically cheaper per ton than airdrops. The cost efficiency on sea is also good, like land crossings, but it’s going to take at least sixty days to build and you can’t get the volume. Eventually, I suppose, they can get big ships in there, and you can start to equal the capacity needed. But, right now, there’s nothing close to what needs to be brought in each day. Everyone has become an expert on the number of trucks, but the truth is we’re just not anywhere near where we need to be. We only have an average of a hundred trucks a day since October 7th <https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/israels-calamity-and-after>; I think only one or two days have had more than two hundred and fifty trucks and very few days have had over two hundred trucks. So when you’re doing ten per cent to twenty per cent of the need . . . The Israeli government talks about capacity and blames others, such as the U.N., and says there’s not enough capacity inside Gaza. Well, yeah, true. The bombs are still falling, and there are not enough trucks. If suddenly we were getting four to five hundred trucks a day, every day, there would need to be more distribution capacity, but the international community can build that capacity. We can all scale up in order to meet the supply. We have things backward. People say, “Well, there’s a problem bringing in aid because there’s desperation, and therefore chaos and violence and insecurity.” But, no, it’s the other way around. There’s chaos and violence and insecurity because people are desperate—because not enough food aid is getting there. If you actually do a surge on food aid, you can tamp down that desperation and that violence. *You mentioned sixty days, or two months, to build this, which is what the Pentagon has suggested. I imagine there are still a lot of logistics to get ships supplied with food.* That’s right. José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen move faster than anybody does. He told me back in October that he was going to bring a boat, and they had done it in Ukraine, but look how long it took. [*The ship departed Cyprus on March 12th and is currently en route to Gaza.*] There is kind of a craziness to this: the U.S. is announcing the building of the pier in order to get more aid in, because we’re failing to get stuff in the land crossings, which already exist. Routes already exist. Thousands of trucks have come in. Instead of the fifteen thousand to sixteen thousand that have come in, it should have been seventy thousand or eighty thousand. I think there’s some fear that once [the pier] is operational, people will say, “O.K., all set. We dealt with it.” Usually, it’s not very often [that a project like this gets] done faster than people are hoping. Everyone is saying sixty days; I’m not hearing anybody say thirty anymore. *Several people were killed <https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-airdropped-aid-deaths-intl/index.html> in one of the airdrops, although we don’t know who conducted it. Can you explain why the airdrops don’t seem to have had a major effect yet, and also the risks that they pose?* I understand why they were done. There’s desperation. Everybody is trying to do what they can. I think, frankly, some governments—not just the U.S. but others as well—who thought that they would make more headway with the Israelis on land aid threw up their hands and said, “Well, let’s do airdrops.” Jordan has been able to do airdrops to supply field hospitals. But they have a huge cost per ton. It is just prohibitive. *You’ve mentioned the cost a couple of times. The U.S. government has a lot of money. Is the reason that airdrops are not happening sufficiently just because it costs a lot to get the planes up in the air?* Well, they’re still going on, right? Other governments are doing them. There is a need, but it’s just the cost, and then killing people is not great. Now, obviously, we’re all worried about people getting killed when they approach food trucks <https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234906745/gaza-food-aid-convoy-israel-hamas>, too, so there are issues there. But, yeah, that’s not a great look to have a parachute fail. I think it’s more that it shouldn’t need to be resorted to. There are some instances where you could imagine access is completely cut off, or the violence on both sides of the conflict is so bad, and no one is providing any access, which is kind of what’s happening here. *The Biden Administration has said that this pier plan would be temporary, but I’ve also heard the argument that this pier could actually be helpful to Gaza in the long term because it’s going to need a tremendous amount of aid for a very long time.* Yes, it could be helpful. I think the important question, though, with a long-term viewpoint is: What Gaza are we talking about? Are we talking about a Gaza that is part of a two-state solution, where Palestinians can return to their homes, and where it’s connected to the West Bank <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers>? Or are we talking about another expulsion of Palestinians, and Israel occupies and sells land for settlements? What is the pier rebuilding? That’s key. *I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your organization’s experiences in the past four months.* *ANERA* was established by a group of mostly American individuals and N.G.O.s—both Arab American and non-Arab American—in the wake of the ’67 war. And so responding to war and displacement of refugees is in our DNA, and we’re pretty good at it now. In the years since then, we’ve done more development than humanitarian response. A big tragedy is that in Gaza, and in the West Bank, too, frankly, we’re not able to do the longer-term development work. We’re not a political organization. We’re not actually about one state or two states. We are focussed on providing support for communities who are wanting to, as President Biden says, live and have equal measures of safety and security and dignity and freedom and prosperity. That’s the long-term work we most like to do and I’m proudest of. On October 7th, I called a staff meeting. Since then, we’ve met every day, usually at 7 *A.M.* Eastern, for a hundred and fifty-nine days. We only had twelve staffers there, and they couldn’t all work at first, because they were trapped or terrified or both. I said, “What do we have in our distribution center?” I called World Central Kitchen, we got in touch with our medical donation partners, and we just haven’t stopped working. *When you said you had twelve employees, you’re saying you had twelve employees in Gaza?* Yeah. One was killed last Friday. *I’m sorry to hear that.* Yeah, it’s our first. In fifty-six years, it is the first time an active employee has been killed. Our lead response coördinator put together a network of volunteers, truck drivers, people helping to put together food parcels. We were all astonished. After ten, twelve days, we’re saying, “Wait a minute, how are you delivering a hundred thousand meals with twelve people?” And he said, “No, we’ve developed this network and so we know how to operate on the ground.” *Can you describe how you’re delivering meals now, given the food situation?* The first meals were all with food procured locally, because the border was completely sealed off at first, and then it took a little while to get stuff going. We had cash support from World Central Kitchen, and we were buying locally. That’s a thing that’s hard for people to understand, too. When you hear people talk about “the world’s largest open-air prison,” there’s no way for anybody to have an image in their mind other than a concrete slab, a chain-link fence, and barbed wire. The idea that it’s an area that has farmland and greenhouses and schools and hospitals and office buildings and grocery stores is hard for people to imagine. It is 2.2 million people, and there was a lot of food there. And so we were procuring locally for a long time, and making hot meals, and putting together fresh-produce parcels and other food parcels. Then stuff started coming in <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/world/middleeast/world-central-kitchen-gaza-aid.html> from World Central Kitchen and others, and we’re making most of the hot meals and food packages with imported food. We are still finding some here or there. The kid of a friend of our lead staff person there died of starvation, and the next day we found thirty tons of potatoes in Gaza City. I said, “Wait a minute, guys, how is this happening?” Then I realized, Oh, yeah, of course, it’s a war and it’s complicated. The owner of the warehouse didn’t know if the potatoes were there or not, because he hadn’t been able to access the warehouse. He goes back to the warehouse and finds that they’re there. And so then we buy those potatoes, and we start making hot meals with potatoes, but that thirty tons doesn’t feed everybody. We have relationships with farmers that we worked with on the long-term development, and we were buying food from them. We got a call last year from a farmers’ co-op in the south, in Rafah, that we had worked with. They told us, “We’re just calling to let you know this, because you put in a solar-operated reverse-osmosis water-filtration system. We’re still operating and we’re growing food and we’re feeding a thousand people.” It was a reminder that if we do more of the long-term development, then you really do build up resilience. If we had had more rooftop gardens and solar installations and stuff that can’t be turned off by the Israelis, then you build resilience and self-reliance. I think that’s the big question moving forward. Again, not one for our organization, but it’s one for the context. If you’re building a pier, what’s it for long-term? What is going to be there? We may not get to a peace treaty tomorrow, or even to a two-state solution tomorrow, but you’ve got to figure out how you deconflict. That begins with recognizing that both sides need to have respect and take away humiliation, right? And that’s hard now, obviously. *I don’t know if you want to share the name or any information about your employee who died, but if you want to share anything, any stories, how that happened, feel free.* His name is Mousa Shawwa. He was a longtime employee, he was our logistics coördinator—very loved, a great family man, absolutely loved his family, loved his youngest son, Karim, who’s in critical condition now. He’s not expected to make it. We’re trying to do everything we can so that he can make it. The Israelis had had the coördinates of the house they were staying in. We had given it to them at least twice <https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/21/u-s-has-sent-israel-data-on-aid-group-locations-to-try-to-prevent-strikes-00128336>, including a few days before the attack. We don’t think that he was targeted, but we do know that the Israelis knew he was there. He was there when the bomb hit, and he died. We’re still trying to get more info, but, like other N.G.O.s, we’re very, very worried. It feels to our staff like they’re being targeted, or at least they’re not being kept safe, and they’re worried for their families. We can talk all we want about temporary piers and airdrops and more land crossings, but if there aren’t people on the inside who can safely deliver . . . and that’s why the ceasefire is so important. If a Rafah operation happens, I just can’t imagine how anything survives. # # # -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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