I'm an aid worker in Gaza – the situation has never been worse

In January, Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Following more than a year of brutal fighting – and more than 40,000 Gazan deaths – the news brought some hope for a fragile peace.

This hope was short-lived. In March, the ceasefire broke down. Israel imposed a complete blockade on the territory, resuming air and ground attacks. Some 2,151 Palestinians have been killed since the resumption of hostilities – and millions are on the brink of starvation.

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British aid worker Gavin Kelleher has spent the last year working with the Norwegian Refugee Council to deliver life-saving support in Gaza. One day after leaving the territory, Kelleher spoke to Big Issue from Amman, Jordan. Here’s what he had to tell us.

BIG ISSUE: How long were you stationed in Gaza?

GAVIN KELLEHER: I’ve been consistently there for just over a year, but every two months or so I take a week or two weeks out. This particular stint was a seven-week rotation. Before I was in Gaza I was in South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and I spent three years in Asia.

Aid has not been permitted into Gaza for more than 50 days. How is that limiting the work you can do as a humanitarian?

The situation right now is the most desperate I’ve seen it. People have already run out of food. As a humanitarian worker, it’s incredibly frustrating that we’ve had our hands tied, and been completely prevented from providing the assistance to people who need it.

We’re seeing a total collapse of Palestinians’ coping mechanisms. They’re selling their last remaining belongings. They’re selling their clothes. They’re trying to exchange a bag of diapers for a bag of lentils. Most families are still surviving on just a meal a day.

Some people are having to split that in two to make it stretch, but that meal a day for around a million people in Gaza is being provided from community kitchens run by a collection of different NGOs, local partners and UN agencies. But those community kitchens are now closing in their dozens, and they will continue to close over the coming days, as they’ve completely exhausted all food stocks.

What did you do during the ceasefire period? How has that changed now that fighting has resumed?

During the ceasefire period, we were able to bring in a significantly higher volume of aid supplies, we were able to scale up our shelter assistance. We distributed thousands of tents, we undertook distributions of warm clothes. We distributed cash assistance so people could have some agency to access whatever service it was that they needed at the time. We distributed significant amounts of clean drinking water and sanitation and hygiene products.

When the ceasefire collapsed, the situation changed drastically. Nothing new is coming into Gaza. Now, at this point, our day to day operation is to deliver clean drinking water to around 60 sites across northern and southern Gaza. And that’s honestly pretty much it.

The humanitarian response has been systematically incapacitated. Every single aid truck that Israel blocks from entering Gaza now risks becoming a death sentence for the people here. We now risk seeing people dying in their tens of thousands because of the denial of assistance.

What toll is it taking on your Palestinian humanitarian colleagues?

Psychologically, people have been exhausted for a really long time now, but when the ceasefire came into effect in January, there was a lot of hope, a lot of cautious optimism. Then the ceasefire collapsed, it was just devastating, and people’s ability to cope with that now, are completely exhausted.

Previously people hoped that there would be a ceasefire, and then we’ll be able to undertake the post conflict reconstruction of Gaza and rebuild. Now we have this narrative being put forward by the American government and by the Israeli government, that the entire population of Gaza will be forcibly transferred out of Gaza.

They call it voluntary emigration, but you can’t volunteer to do something if you’re coerced with starvation and warfare.

Were you in Gaza when the ceasefire was announced?

When it was finally announced, there was jubilance, people were really excited. [As humanitarians], we could move around more freely. We could access populations in locations that had been completely off limits to us. We went and set up tent distributions in Northern Gaza. People were returning from the south or returning from Gaza City. And there was this real optimism, we were very cautious, but when we saw 700,000 people move from the South to the North, and walking up the coastal road, it felt like, OK, maybe I’ll start to believe it.

[When the ceasefire collapsed], I was in Gaza City with a number of both international colleagues and Palestinian colleagues. It was around two in the morning, and I was asleep, and I woke up to that building vibrating, and to the sounds of these air strikes, and to people were shouting. It was evident the ceasefire had collapsed.

It was a massively deadly, scary night across Gaza. I gathered with some colleagues into a corridor which was the safest part of our building. We were sat on the floor and I was making tea for them and we were trying to do a head count to check if our staff were OK. There was just this distance there, this resignation and this fear and this acceptance of this is just the fate that we have here, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The deprivation of aid in the siege is awful, but also the massacres that have continued to take place on a daily basis, the babies and infants being burned and killed in these nonstop detonations. There’s no safe space in Gaza.

The Israeli government say that they’re fighting Hamas. Critics of Israel have said it amounts to “collective punishment” of ordinary Gazans. What do you think of this?

It is categorically collective punishment of every single Palestinian in Gaza.

Every single one of their humanitarian needs is being weaponized against them. There is no other way to interpret this. On 9 March, Israel cut the electricity line to the large water desalination plant in Gaza. The bombing of civilian infrastructure, the bombing of schools, the bombing of hospitals. This is collective punishment of Palestinians.

The end game seems to be that Israel is set on creating conditions that will be conducive to a massive Palestinian exodus from Gaza in the coming weeks and months.

Do you worry about ‘compassion fatigue’? What can a Big Issue reader do?

I think no one is more tired from hearing about the situation in Gaza than Palestinians themselves and we all have an obligation to stay up to date with what’s unfolding in Gaza. All of us should be encouraging our own governments to ensure that international humanitarian law in Gaza is respected. People should know that the situation is worse than it ever has been.

Humanitarian access can be incredibly complicated and complex. In Gaza, that is categorically not the case. There are thousands and thousands of trucks of aid waiting at the Gazan border that are just simply not being allowed in, and it is a decision of the Israeli government to deny assistance at scale that is undermining the aid effort. So I think it’s important to keep in mind how simple of a solution this is – we must maximise all efforts at getting the aid across the border.

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