WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States hopes to have local arrangements in Gaza ready for aid workers to begin delivering food, treatment for starving children and other urgent assistance by mid-month, when the U.S. military expects complete a floating dock for the help, said an official at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But the aid arriving through the new US-led sea route will still serve only a fraction – half a million people – of those who need help in Gaza, the USAID official told the Associated Press. These are some of the agency’s first comments on the progress of preparations for the Biden administration $320 million Gaza pier projectfor which USAID is helping coordinate security and distribution on the ground.
Meanwhile, at a factory in south Georgia, USAID Administrator Samantha Power is expected to announce on Friday a $200 million investment to increase U.S. production of emergency nutritional treatment for hungry children under 5 years old, as conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere increase this need.
USAID made the official working on humanitarian operations in Gaza available for an interview ahead of Power’s announcement on the condition that the official not be identified, citing security concerns due to the person’s work in conflict.
As Israel-Hamas War The conflict, which has lasted nearly seven months and Israel has restricted humanitarian aid, means half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are at imminent risk of famine, international health officials say. Under pressure from the US and other countries, Israeli authorities have in recent weeks begun to slowly reopen some border crossings to humanitarian aid shipments.
Children under 5 are among the first to die when wars, droughts or other disasters reduce food supply. Hospital workers in northern Gaza reported the first starvation deaths in early March and said most of those killed were children.
USAID is coordinating with the UN World Food Program, Israel and many others security and distribution for pier project, while US military forces finish building it to deliver aid by ship. President Joe Biden, under pressure to do more to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the US provides military support to Israel, announced the pier project in early March.
U.S. Central Command said in a statement Friday that offshore assembly of the floating dock was temporarily halted due to high winds and sea waves, which caused unsafe conditions for soldiers. The partially built pier and the military vessels involved went to the port of Ashdod and work will continue there.
A U.S. official said high seas will delay the installation for several days, possibly until the end of next week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the operation, said the pause could last longer if bad weather continues because military personnel and divers have to enter the water to do some of the final installations.
The United Nations has been silenced about its role in delivering aid.
“We want to see more land operations. This is a maritime operation,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Wednesday. “We are working with them, but obviously we have certain parameters that need to be respected, namely the basic humanitarian principles that we have of independence and be free from all types of military.”
Difficulties with delivering the first aid through a recently reopened land corridor to northern Gaza on Wednesday highlighted the uncertainty over the safety and danger that aid workers still face. Israeli settlers blocked the convoy before it crossed, and then Hamas militants diverted a World Food Program truck into Gaza before it reached its destination.
The power was at a factory in Fitzgerald, Georgia, one of only two in the U.S. that makes a nutrient-packed paste. The ready-to-use therapeutic food, known as RUTF, was designed as a life-saving treatment to be administered in a controlled clinical environment to hungry children under the age of 5.
In Gaza, the portfolio is most urgently needed in the northern part of the Palestinian territory. Civilians were deprived of most aid supplies, bombarded by Israeli airstrikes and forced into hiding during the fighting.
Rates of acute malnutrition among children under 5 rose from 1% before the war to 30% five months later, the USAID official said. The official considered it the fastest increase in hunger in recent history, more than the serious conflicts and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.
One of the few medical facilities still functioning in northern Gaza, the Kamal Adwan hospital, is under siege by parents bringing thousands of malnourished children for treatment, the official said. Humanitarian authorities believe that many more hungry children remain invisible and in need, with families unable to get them through the fighting and checkpoints to care.
Saving severely malnourished children, in particular, requires a huge increase in aid distribution and a sustained calm in the fighting, the official said, so that aid workers can set up treatment facilities across the territory and families can bring children with security for the necessary sustained treatment.
