Destruction, Lawlessness and Red Tape Hobble Gaza Aid

FILE PHOTO: Trucks are parked at the Nitzana Crossing, in Nitzana, Israel, January 30, 2024. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Trucks are parked at the Nitzana Crossing, in Nitzana, Israel, January 30, 2024. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo
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Destruction, Lawlessness and Red Tape Hobble Gaza Aid

FILE PHOTO: Trucks are parked at the Nitzana Crossing, in Nitzana, Israel, January 30, 2024. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Trucks are parked at the Nitzana Crossing, in Nitzana, Israel, January 30, 2024. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo

In mid-March, a line of trucks stretched for 3 kilometers along a desert road near a crossing point from Israel into the Gaza Strip. On the same day, another line of trucks, some 1.5 kilometers long, sometimes two or three across, was backed up near a crossing from Egypt into Gaza.

The trucks were filled with aid, much of it food, for the more than 2 million Palestinians in the war-ravaged enclave. About 50 kilometers from Gaza, more aid trucks – some 2,400 in total – were sitting idle this month in the Egyptian city of Al Arish, according to an Egyptian Red Crescent official.

These motionless food-filled trucks, the main lifeline for Gazans, are at the heart of the escalating humanitarian crisis gripping the enclave. More than five months into Israel’s war with Hamas, a report by a global authority on food security has warned that famine is imminent in parts of Gaza, as more than three-quarters of the population have been forced from their homes and swathes of the territory are in ruins.

Galvanized by reports and images of starving children, the international community, led by the United States, has been pressuring Israel to facilitate the transfer of more aid into Gaza. Washington has airdropped food into the Mediterranean enclave and recently announced it would build a pier off the Gaza coast to help ferry in more aid.

UN officials have accused Israel of blocking humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The European Union’s foreign policy chief alleged Israel was using starvation as a “weapon of war.” And aid agency officials say Israeli red tape is slowing the flow of trucks carrying food supplies.

Israeli officials reject these accusations and say they have increased aid access to Gaza. Israel isn’t responsible for delays in aid getting into Gaza, they say, and the delivery of aid once inside the territory is the responsibility of the UN and humanitarian agencies. Israel has also accused Hamas of stealing aid.

Reuters interviewed more than two dozen people, including humanitarian workers, Israeli military officials and truck drivers, in tracing the tortuous route that aid takes into Gaza in an effort to identify the chokepoints and reasons for delays of supplies. Reuters also reviewed UN and Israeli military statistics on aid shipments, as well as satellite images of the border crossing areas, which revealed the long lines of trucks.

Before the aid shipments enter Gaza, they undergo a series of Israeli checks, and a shipment approved at one stage of the process can later be rejected, according to 18 aid workers and UN officials involved in the aid effort. At one crossing from Israel into Gaza, goods are twice loaded off trucks and then reloaded onto other trucks that then carry the aid to warehouses in Gaza. The aid delivery process can also be complicated by competing international demands, with some countries wanting their contributions to be prioritized.
Aid that does make it into Gaza can be ransacked by desperate civilians, sometimes fall prey to armed gangs, or get held up by Israeli army checkpoints. Half the warehouses storing aid in Gaza are no longer operational after having been hit in the fighting.

“It’s upsetting watching these aid trucks go nowhere and vast humanitarian supplies sit in warehouses when you think about what’s happening, right now, to the people who need them,” said Paolo Pezzati, an Oxfam worker who recently visited the queue of aid trucks near the Egypt-Gaza border.

Before the war began, an average of 200 trucks carrying aid entered Gaza each day, according to UN figures. A further 300 trucks laden with commercial imports, including food, agricultural supplies and industrial materials, also entered each day via Israel. Since the start of the war, an average of around 100 trucks have entered Gaza daily, according to a review of UN and Israeli military statistics on aid shipments.

While the trucks struggle to get into Gaza, the need for aid has risen dramatically, both because of the vast number of displaced people and the devastation of key infrastructure in Israel’s assault. This includes the destruction of bakeries, markets, and farmland whose crops met some of Gaza’s food needs.

“Previous wars weren’t like this,” said Alaa al-Atar, a municipal official, referring to conflicts in Gaza. “There wasn’t the destruction of all sources of subsistence – homes, farmland, infrastructure. There’s nothing left to survive on, just aid,” said Atar, who was displaced from the north to the south of Gaza early in the war.

To meet its minimum needs, aid agencies and UN officials say Gaza currently requires 500 to 600 trucks a day, including humanitarian aid and the commercial supplies that were coming in before the war. That’s about four times the number of trucks getting in now.

In March there has been an uptick, with an average of 150 trucks entering Gaza each day.

Some deliveries are being made by international air drops and via sea, but they aren't making up for shortfalls on the land routes. In the first three weeks of March, the equivalent of some 50 truckloads of aid was airdropped and brought in by sea, a Reuters tally based on Israeli military statistics showed.

The recent food security report, known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), found that a lack of aid means almost all households in Gaza are skipping meals every day and adults are cutting back on meals so their children can eat. The situation is particularly dire in northern Gaza, it said, where in nearly two-thirds of households, “people went entire days and nights without eating at least 10 times in the last 30 days.”

A senior Hamas official said Israel is responsible for the inadequate aid flows. The “biggest threat” to the distribution of aid is Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza, Hamas official Bassem Naim told Reuters. “The biggest obstacle to getting the aid to the people who need it is the continued gunfire and the continued targeting of aid and those who are handling it,” he said.

WAITING IN THE DESERT

Before some of the aid begins its journey to Gaza, it is flown to Cairo or shipped by sea to Port Said, which borders Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, about 150 kms to the west of Al Arish. From there, it is trucked to the city of Al Arish, on the Mediterranean coast. Some aid is also flown directly to the Egyptian city.

Once in Cairo or Al Arish, the aid undergoes its first check. International agencies submit a detailed inventory of each shipment to the Israeli military via the UN for clearance. Israel has long banned “dual use” items that it says could be used by Hamas to make weapons.

Of 153 requests made to the Israeli authorities for goods to enter Gaza between Jan. 11 and March 15, 100 were cleared, 15 were rejected outright and another 38 were pending, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told Reuters. UN officials didn’t specify whether a request referred to a specific number of trucks or volume of aid. It takes almost a month on average to get a response, according to minutes of a meeting of aid agencies seen by Reuters.

The Israeli military says it approves almost 99% of the Gaza-bound trucks it inspects and that once the goods are inside the enclave, it is the responsibility of the international aid organizations to distribute it. The inspection process “isn’t the impediment” to aid “getting into the Gaza Strip,” said Shimon Freedman, a spokesman for COGAT, the Israeli military branch that handles aid transfers.

Diplomatic wrangling by countries donating aid can also create snarls in the delivery process. UN officials told Reuters that because aid comes not only from international agencies but also directly from individual donor countries, the process of deciding which trucks go to the front of the queue can be thorny even before they depart Al Arish.

The Egyptian Red Crescent official said donor countries “drop off aid in Al Arish or at Al Arish airport and walk away and say, ‘We gave out aid to Gaza.’” It is the Red Crescent and Egyptian authorities who then bear the responsibility of getting the aid to Gaza, he said.

From Al Arish, the trucks make the 50-kilometer journey to the Rafah crossing point on the Egypt-Gaza border.

Next stop: Israel’s truck-scanning centers.

Once they reach the Rafah crossing, some trucks are then required to drive along the Egypt-Israel border for 40 kilometers to an inspection facility on the Israeli side called Nitzana. Here the goods are physically checked by Israeli soldiers who use scanning machines and sniffer dogs, according to UN and other aid agency staff.

Some items get rejected during the physical inspection, in particular ones Israel believes could be used by Hamas and other armed groups for military purposes. Some shipments carrying dual-use items are sent back to Al Arish. The same item that is let through one day, can be rejected on another day, UN officials and aid workers said.

UN agencies say solar panels, metal tent poles, oxygen tanks, generators and water purification equipment are among the items the military has rejected.

COGAT’S Freedman said there is a publicized list of what constitutes dual-use items, but there isn’t a “blanket ban” on these goods. If Israeli authorities “understand what exactly it is necessary for, we can coordinate it,” he said. But Israel wants to be sure that goods aren’t going to be “used by Hamas for terrorist activities,” he said.

The Israeli military says it can scan a total of 44 trucks an hour at Nitzana and at a crossing from Israel into Gaza where aid trucks are inspected, at Kerem Shalom. But aid agency officials say the actual number scanned is fewer. The military declined to say how many hours Nitzana and Kerem Shalom are open each day.

Once the trucks pass inspection at Nitzana, they make the 40-kilometer journey back to Rafah, where they wait to cross into Gaza.

In late January, groups of Israelis, including friends and relatives of the more than 130 people still being held hostage by Hamas, began protesting against the delivery of aid to Gaza. Between late January and early March, the protests effectively shut down either Nitzana or Kerem Shalom for a total of 16 days, according to aid agencies.

At the Kerem Shalom crossing, goods are unloaded from the scanned trucks and reloaded onto trucks that have been vetted by the Israeli army, according to UN and aid agency workers. These “sanitized” trucks then make a 1 kilometer journey to a warehouse inside Gaza where the aid is again offloaded. The goods are then placed on trucks driven by Palestinians and taken to mostly UN-run warehouses in Rafah.

Under growing international pressure, Israel earlier this month initiated a new route for the delivery of aid directly to northern Gaza, known as the 96th gate. By March 20, COGAT said at least 86 international aid trucks had entered via the new crossing.

“There is a sufficient amount of food entering Gaza every day,” said Col. Moshe Tetro, a COGAT official overseeing Gaza.

The new route was initiated “as part of a pilot in order to prevent Hamas from taking over the aid,” COGAT said in a post on social media site X. Freedman, though, said he didn’t have “specific evidence” he could share about Hamas pilfering aid.

Hamas official Naim rejected the accusation that the group was stealing aid. “We have been cooperating and are cooperating with every single state and humanitarian organization so that the aid reaches people in dire need,” he said.

AN ARDUOUS JOURNEY

Once inside Gaza, the aid shipments face more challenges.
Several convoys have been attacked on the stretch of road from Kerem Shalom to Gaza warehouses by people carrying crude weapons such as axes and box-cutters, according to UN officials and truck drivers. Deeper inside Gaza, others have been swarmed by crowds of people desperate for food.

In an incident that galvanized aid efforts, more than 100 people were killed in late February when a crowd descended on an aid convoy organized by Israel.
Security for food convoys traveling the short distance from the crossing points to warehouses in Rafah also deteriorated after several strikes by the Israeli military killed at least eight policemen in Gaza, according to UN officials. Israel says all police are members of Hamas.

“Whether they’re Hamas or not I don’t know, but they were doing a job for us in terms of crowd control,” said Jamie McGoldrick, a senior UN official. “The police are less willing to do that now.”

Aid agencies mostly now negotiate their own security with local communities, McGoldrick said.

Reuters reported recently that armed and masked men from an array of clans and factions in Gaza had begun providing security to aid convoys.

Police officers in Gaza “are Hamas, they are part of the Hamas terrorist organization,” COGAT’s Freedman said. Israel doesn’t target humanitarian convoys, “we try to assist them, but Hamas is our enemy.”

Storing aid in Gaza has also become a problem. Warehouses have been damaged by the fighting and occasionally looted. Of the 43 warehouses in Gaza that were operational before the war, only 22 are now working, according to the Logistics Cluster, a UN-run logistics facilitator for aid agencies.

In mid-March, an Israeli airstrike hit a UN food distribution center in southern Gaza, killing several people. Israel said it killed a Hamas commander in the attack. Hamas said the man targeted by Israel was a member of its police force.

From the warehouses, aid is delivered to southern Gaza, where the majority of the population is now located.

Making deliveries to northern Gaza is more fraught.

Roads to the north have been bombed by Israel and there are delays as trucks are held up or denied access at Israeli army checkpoints, say UN and other aid agency officials. Aid convoys are also often looted before reaching their destination by crowds of people desperate for food, UN officials said.

UN officials told Reuters that humanitarian agencies had made 158 requests to the Israeli military to deliver aid to northern Gaza from the beginning of the war to March 14. Of those, the military denied 57, they said.

COGAT’s Freedman said some requests to move aid inside Gaza have been rejected because aid agencies didn’t coordinate sufficiently with Israel.
“They weren't able to tell us exactly where that aid was going,” he said. “And if we don't know where it's going to, we don't know it's not going to end up in the hands of Hamas.”
In southern Gaza, residents are desperately waiting for aid.
“People have nothing to eat at all, nor do they have a place to stay, or a refuge,” said Suleiman al-Jaal, a local truck driver who said he has been attacked transporting aid in Gaza. “This is not a life. No matter how much aid they bring in, it’s not enough.”



Syrians in Libya Struggle to Escape ‘Exile in Limbo’

A photo shows young Syrian men who drowned after their boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Credit: Rights activist Tarek Lamloum
A photo shows young Syrian men who drowned after their boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Credit: Rights activist Tarek Lamloum
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Syrians in Libya Struggle to Escape ‘Exile in Limbo’

A photo shows young Syrian men who drowned after their boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Credit: Rights activist Tarek Lamloum
A photo shows young Syrian men who drowned after their boat capsized off the coast of Libya. Credit: Rights activist Tarek Lamloum

About seven months ago, a group of 25 Syrian youths, including minors, set off from Libya on an irregular migration journey toward Europe. Only four made it back alive. The rest drowned in the Mediterranean.

The tragedy, which left a deep mark on Syrian communities both in Libya and abroad, has drawn renewed attention to the large and diverse Syrian population now living in the North African country, some fleeing the war in Syria under former President Bashar al-Assad, others settled there long before.

Syria’s presence in Libya is far from monolithic. It spans businessmen, migrant laborers, families who settled during the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, and former fighters now working as mercenaries. Many also see Libya as a temporary stop on the perilous path to Europe.

For most, Libya is not the destination but a gateway. The recent drowning of 21 Syrians in the Mediterranean was not an isolated tragedy, but part of a pattern of loss that has haunted the community for years.

Reports from local and international migration watchdogs have documented repeated drownings and arrests of Syrians at sea, with many captured by Libya’s coastguard and detained in overcrowded jails.

Despite the risks, many Syrians have managed to adapt to life in Libya, integrating into local communities and participating in its economy.

Yet numerous challenges persist, particularly for undocumented workers and those living without valid residency papers. Many report facing discrimination, abuse, and difficult working conditions.

As thousands of Syrian refugees across the Middle East prepare to return home amid improving conditions and relaxed restrictions, Syrians in Libya remain stuck, unable to stay, and unable to leave.

“We’re caught in the middle,” said one Syrian resident in Tripoli. “We can’t endure much longer, but we also can’t afford to go back.”

Many Syrians in Libya say they are increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, including passport confiscation and harassment by armed groups and criminal gangs operating with impunity.

Several Syrian residents told Asharq Al-Awsat they are facing rising unemployment, frequent kidnappings, and demands for ransom by militias. For those who now wish to return to Syria, doing so has become financially prohibitive due to hefty fines for visa violations.

Steep Penalties for Overstaying

Under a revised Libyan immigration law enacted on March 14, 2024, foreigners who overstay their visas or residency permits are charged 500 Libyan dinars - around $90 - per month. The regulation adds a significant burden for many Syrians whose legal documents have expired and who lack the resources to renew them or pay the fines required to exit the country legally.

Due to the political division in Libya since 2014, no official statistics exist on the number of foreign residents. However, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported in 2020 that approximately 14,500 Syrian refugees and asylum seekers were living in Libya.

Ten years after arriving in Libya, Ahmed Kamal Al-Fakhouri says he is now trapped, unable to afford life in the country or the high costs of leaving it.

“They’ve imposed fines on us that are beyond reason - nearly $1,500 per person,” said Fakhouri, a restaurant worker in Tripoli, echoing a growing outcry among Syrians in Libya burdened by mounting penalties and legal uncertainties. “Sometimes, I can’t even afford a day’s meal.”

Fakhouri fled Derna after the deadly floods of August 2023 and resettled in Tripoli.

“I saw death with my own eyes,” he told Asharq Al-Awsat, describing the trauma of losing his home. “Now we’re living in misery. We want the world to hear our voice - we want to go back to our country.”

Libya hosts thousands of Syrians, including doctors, engineers, university students, and day laborers who fill the country’s markets in search of work to support their families.

Yet many say they now find themselves stuck, facing visa penalties they can’t afford and no clear path home - even as the fall of Assad’s regime renews hopes for return.

“Exit Tax” Burdens Families

While Libya’s labor ministries have issued no formal statement on the matter, members of the Syrian community say they are being charged an "exit tax" calculated based on their overstay period. No official decree has been published, but testimonies suggest the fees are acting as a de facto barrier to departure.

Following Assad’s ouster, many Syrians are reconsidering return, describing exile as a “prison,” but are deterred by the financial burden of settling overstays.

Asharq Al-Awsat reached out to both of Libya’s rival labor ministries to clarify policies affecting Syrians and the reported fines for expired documents, but received no response.

Zekeriya Saadi, another Syrian living in Tripoli, has publicly called on authorities in both eastern and western Libya to cancel the exit tax and allow those wishing to return to Syria to do so.

“In these unbearable conditions, it’s unreasonable to ask refugees to pay such high fees just to leave the country,” he said. “This tax is a major obstacle, it exceeds our capacity, especially given our financial hardships.”

Saadi said most Syrians in Libya are low-income families without stable jobs. “Many are at risk of eviction, kidnapping, or exploitation. Leaving has become a matter of survival,” he said. “How can a displaced person be treated like a tourist or a wealthy expat?”

He urged Syria’s Foreign Ministry to take a clear stance and negotiate with Libyan authorities for fee exemptions and coordinated return efforts, while also working to protect Syrians who remain in the country.

Passport Problems Bar Education

Beyond financial barriers, expired passports are also stranding Syrians in legal limbo. Many have lost access to services, and the issue is now affecting the next generation.

According to Syrian media reports, education officials in Misrata barred at least 100 Syrian children from enrolling in public schools because their parents’ passports had expired, highlighting how bureaucratic obstacles are deepening the crisis for displaced families.