A new sea route for aid to Gaza is on track, USAID says. Treating hungry children is a priority

WASHINGTON – The United States hopes to have arrangements on the ground 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 hopes to complete a floating dock for the effort, an official said. from the US 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 status of preparations for the Biden administration’s $320 million Gaza pier project, for which USAID is helping coordinate security and field distribution.

Meanwhile, at a factory in south Georgia, USAID Administrator Samantha Power is expected to announce a $200 million investment on Friday to increase U.S. production of emergency nutritional treatment for hungry children under 5. years as conflicts escalate in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere. the necessity.

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.

With the Israel-Hamas war lasting nearly seven months and Israel restricting humanitarian aid, 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 deaths from starvation 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 its construction for the delivery of 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.

The United Nations has been silent about its role until now.

“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.