U.N. coordinator describes challenges of providing humanitarian aid to Gaza

The United Nations called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the immediate release of all Israeli hostages and for humanitarian aid access to be unimpeded. Sigrid Kaag is the UN’s senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza. She has visited Gaza often since taking over the job earlier this year and briefed the Security Council. Nick Schifrin sat down with Kaag to discuss more.

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Amna Nawaz: Today, the United Nations called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the immediate release of all Israeli hostages, and for humanitarian aid access to be unimpeded.

Nick Schifrin speaks to the head of the U.N.’s humanitarian effort in Gaza.

Nick Schifrin: Sigrid Kaag is a Dutch politician, a former first deputy prime minister, and diplomat with years of experience at the U.N. and throughout the Middle East. She is now the U.N.’s senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza. She’s visited Gaza often since taking over the job earlier this year, and today briefed the Security Council.

Sigrid Kaag, thanks very much. Welcome to the “News Hour.”

In that briefing of the Security Council today, you said the war had — quote — “turned Gaza into the abyss.” What do you mean?

Sigrid Kaag, U.N. Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza: Well, everything is destroyed. Life has halted. Over 41,000 Palestinians have lost their lives, and over 90,000 have been injured.

And in that group, you have a lot of women, children who’ve sustained life-changing injuries. So it is dystopian. It’s also very strange when you go to Gaza, and I have been going in and out of Gaza over 30 years, to see that there’s no building standing, the roads are destroyed, people are all huddled in tents.

It’s a total life-changing experience for everyone in Gaza. And for those who try to work there to render assistance, it is something that you cannot imagine, let alone describe.

Nick Schifrin: Let me highlight one recent success before we get to some of the specifics you just said.

Thanks to agreed pauses in the fighting, the first of two rounds of polio vaccines have been completed and have reached 90 percent of Gaza’s 640,000 children. How have the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNRWA, managed to do that in the middle of a war zone?

Sigrid Kaag: Well, this basically is because they agreed and worked closely with the Israeli Defense Forces.

And at the political level, I have discussed it with the authorities that there should be humanitarian pauses. The parties to the conflict have agreed. And this gave the space to actually reach people safely and securely, but it also meant we needed the cold chain to work, the equipment, the vaccines to be in Gaza, and thousands of volunteers to be in a position to actually do their job.

It demonstrates that you need political will to achieve these kinds of operations, because it’s highly complex and highly dangerous.

Nick Schifrin: You noted today that the — quote — “breakdown” of law and order and looting of supplies are impeding assistance distribution, and you also said that there had been denials, delays and a lack of safety for humanitarian workers.

How short is Gaza of the assistance it needs?

Sigrid Kaag: Well, the gap is significant. Let’s face it. And it varies from day to day.

It depends on the volume that actually is allowed in, that gets cleared and checked, but also the ability for humanitarians to come to the checkpoints, to the crossings to retrieve it, to then actually take it back to the warehouses. And that’s, of course, also where law and order, safety and security are serious issues.

This is not only a matter of supplies to the crossings. It’s also our collective ability to receive and distribute. And a lot more needs to happen in order to actually be affirmative in reaching those goals.

Nick Schifrin: The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, says between the 1st of September and the 9th of September, only 62 trucks per day entered Gaza.

But if you ask Israel and Israel’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the territories, or COGAT, they point out that commercial Palestinian trucks are entering, 163 just yesterday. So why can Palestinians bring in trucks at a scale that the U.N. is unable or unwilling to do?

Sigrid Kaag: Well, I’m not going to make a blanket comparison here. What’s important is that Gaza needs both. It needs humanitarian goods, because they’re free of charge at the end of the day for the population, and it needs commercial goods.

And the commercial sector has agreements with the IDF, but often it’s the commercial sector from Egypt. It can also be from the West Bank or Israel. And they often organize themselves also that they have security on top of the truck, basically.

As humanitarians, we can’t do that. So we’re both vulnerable, but we’re also dependent on the approvals given. The most important comparator, I would say, is before the 7th of October, 1,000 trucks a day entered Gaza. So if you add up these statistics on a good day currently, 150 and 60, that’s only 210.

Now, you can then easily conclude that there’s nowhere near meeting the basic needs of the population. And the needs have only grown because the whole of Gaza lies in ruins.

Nick Schifrin: As you know, Israeli officials question why there is any U.N. aid or humanitarian aid sitting inside Gaza. They point out the distribution problems within Gaza that you have struggled with.

Why haven’t you been able to overcome some of those distribution problems?

Sigrid Kaag: I would turn the question around. There are roles and responsibilities.

Under international humanitarian law, the humanitarian workers need to be protected. They cannot be targets. The safety and security needs to be guaranteed. If the volume is too little or it’s too unsafe because the fighting continues, humanitarians can’t work. And you can see that in the statistic of the high number of humanitarian workers who’ve lost their lives.

I wish it were as easy as statements. The complexity of delivering on humanitarian assistance in a war zone which is Gaza and the density of the population and huddled together in around 11 percent of the Gaza Strip makes this a totally different story.

We need a cease fire, and we need the unconditional release of the hostages in order to actually start to reach people in a serious manner.

Nick Schifrin: Just last week, there were strikes on a U.N. school turned shelter and on tents in the humanitarian zone, Al-Mawasi, that Palestinians say killed as many as 40 people.

Israel says in both cases the targets were members of Hamas, senior members of Hamas in the case of Al-Mawasi. Do you believe Hamas is using U.N. schools turned shelters, as well as the humanitarian zone, as shields for their militant activities? Do you believe these strikes were justified?

Sigrid Kaag: I don’t think it’s a matter of what I believe.

We know what international humanitarian law says, that civilian infrastructure should not be used by any of the parties and it can also not be a target. We always need to be mindful of the protection of civilians and the proportionality in the conduct of war.

I’m not in Gaza right now and I’m not an investigator, but we know the duty and the obligations on the parties to the conflict are very clear.

Nick Schifrin: And finally, Sigrid Kaag, part of your title is reconstruction. And the Israeli military allowed foreign journalists to visit Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor that separates Gaza from Egypt late last week.

And the images, frankly, looked like a moonscape. What will it take to reconstruct Gaza?

Sigrid Kaag: One has to imagine indeed a moonscape with a very desperate population, a population that was highly educated, that is keen to have their children be learning again, a population that yearns for a cease-fire and the ability to restart what was left of their lives.

So everything is needed. The cost will be humongous. An earlier damage assessment, a basic needs assessment done in March already indicated the initial cost of $18 billion. The cost of reconstruction will be significantly more. And this needs a long-term commitment, political, but also in financial terms from the different stakeholders, but also private sector and investors.

But we need to start the plans now. They’re available. The Palestinian Authority has designed them. The international community has them. It’s a long, hard slog which requires everybody, and to not forget about the population in Gaza. When there’s a cease-fire, the work is only beginning.

Nick Schifrin: Sigrid Kaag, thank you very much.