Ciaran Donnelly, Senior Vice President, International Rescue Committee:
The chaotic scenes that we have seen in Rafah today really just bear out the warnings that the IRC and other humanitarian agencies have been putting out for the last number of weeks around this Israeli-led aid initiative.
The situation in Gaza is dire, as you know. There’s over two million people who are living in acute food insecurity. That means they don’t have enough food for themselves and their families. There’s almost 500,000 of those people who are living in catastrophic — that’s famine-level — food insecurity.
Our teams on the ground are saying families of five and six people are sharing a single piece of bread among themselves as a meal before they go to bed every night. So it’s a really dire situation.
Now, there are solutions to this, scaling up aid at the speed and volume that’s needed, but doing that requires working with the humanitarian community on the ground, organizations like ours that have the experience and expertise to be able to deliver aid in conflict environments in ways that are transparent, safe, accountable, ways that respect the dignity of the people receiving aid.
But the ways in which this new initiative have been developed have essentially left us excluded from the design of it and unable to work on the ground and deliver the programs that we most desperately need to be able to do.