WASHINGTON — The United States expects arrangements on the ground in Gaza to be in place so that humanitarian workers can begin delivering food, treatment for starving children and other emergency assistance in early to mid-month, when the US military expects to construct a floating pier for the effort to complete. That’s according to an official from the US Agency for International Development.
But aid coming through the new U.S.-led maritime route will still serve only a fraction — half a million people — of those needing help in Gaza, the USAID official insisted to The Associated Press. These are among the agency’s first comments on the status of preparations for the Biden administration’s $320 million Gaza pier project, for which USAID is helping coordinate security and distribution on the ground.
Meanwhile, USAID Administrator Samantha Power will announce a $200 million investment later Friday at a factory in South Georgia to boost U.S. production of emergency nutritional treatments for starving children under the age of five, as conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere intensify increase. the need.
USAID made the official handling humanitarian operations in Gaza available for an interview ahead of Power’s announcement on condition the official not be identified, citing security concerns given the person’s work in conflict.
With the war between Israel and Hamas dragging on for nearly seven months and Israel restricting humanitarian aid, half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are at immediate risk of famine, international health officials say. Under pressure from the U.S. and others, Israeli officials have slowly begun reopening some border crossings for aid shipments in recent weeks.
Children under the age of five are among the first to die when wars, droughts or other disasters limit food supplies. Hospital officials in northern Gaza reported the first deaths from hunger in early March and said most of the dead were children.
USAID is coordinating with the UN World Food Program, Israel and many others on the security and distribution of the pier project, while the US military completes construction for ship-based aid deliveries. President Joe Biden, under pressure to do more to ease the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the US provides military support to Israel, announced the pier project in early March.
The United Nations has so far been cautious about its role.
“We want to see more land operations. This is an operation at sea,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Wednesday. “We are working with them, but it is clear that we have to respect certain parameters, especially the basic humanitarian principles that we have of independence and freedom from all kinds of threats. army.”
Struggles to deliver first aid across a newly reopened land corridor to northern Gaza on Wednesday underscored the uncertainty about safety and danger aid workers continue to face. Israeli settlers blocked the convoy before it crossed the border, and then Hamas militants led a World Food Program truck into Gaza before it reached its destination.
Power was on at a plant in Fitzgerald, Georgia, one of only two in the U.S. making a nutrient-packed paste. The ready-to-eat therapeutic food, known as RUTF, is designed as a life-saving treatment that can be given in a controlled clinical setting to starving children under the age of five.
In Gaza, the pasta is most urgently needed in the northern part of the Palestinian territory. Civilians have been cut off from most aid supplies, bombarded by Israeli airstrikes and forced into hiding by fighting.
The rate of acute malnutrition among children under five rose from 1% before the war to 30% five months later, the USAID official said. The official called it the fastest rise in hunger in recent history, surpassing that of severe conflict and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.
One of the few medical facilities still operating in northern Gaza, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, is under siege by parents who bring in thousands of children with malnutrition for treatment, the official said. Aid officials believe many more starving children remain unseen and in need, with families unable to get them through fighting and checkpoints to care.
Rescuing the severely malnourished children in particular will require both a greatly increased supply of aid and continued calm in the fighting, the official said, so that aid workers can set up treatment facilities across the area and families can safely bring in children for the long-term treatment needed.