The United Nations (UN) rejected an offer Wednesday from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to transport its aid, sitting idle after crossing into Gaza, for free, despite its claims Palestinians face starvation.
Earlier Wednesday, the GHF, which uses private security contractors to move its own aid trucks across the Gaza Strip to secure distribution sites, sent a letter to the UN, offering to move its aid across the Strip.
“Our top priority is feeding the people of Gaza, and we’re prepared to adjust our supply chains, work with the UN or other teams to organize the packaging and transport and distribute it to those in need, or we can work with organizations to provide security to ensure food reaches its intended destination,” said GHF Interim Director John Acree. “We are ready and able to start today.”
The UN had claimed that the reason hundreds of truckloads of aid that Israel had allowed into Gaza was still sitting uncollected was that Israel would not let the UN pick it up, owing to security checks and bureaucratic requirements.
According to GHF, however, the UN could not deliver its own aid because of a lack of capacity and because drivers feared looting by Hamas. (Some drivers, GHF spokesman Chapin Fay told Breitbart News, are also working with Hamas.)
Regardless, GHF offered to help the UN deliver its aid. That offer was rejected, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said, because he claimed the GHF aid sites “increase the risk of people to be shot at or trampled while trying to get food.”
Earlier, Dujarric had admitted that Palestinians are hurt approaching the UN’s own aid sites: “all too often, civilians approaching our trucks are shot at or trampled while trying to get food.”
UN agencies say Palestinians are “starving to death” — a claim that Israel denied Wednesday, calling it a “false warning” and adding that where there had been hunger in Gaza, it had been “orchestrated by Hamas.”
The UN and Hamas are both opposed to the GHF, which is undermining their role — and which threatens to undermine Hamas’s control of the flow of aid, which it uses to feed and enrich itself, and cement its power.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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