Eyewitness: Tons of food aid lies abandoned along Gaza roadside

The sight contradicted Hamas starvation claims, Ynet’s Ron Ben Yishai reported.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Tons of food aid are lying abandoned on a roadside in Gaza even as Hamas falsely accuses Israel of starving its people, Ynet reported from the scene Saturday.

While embedded with Israeli troops traveling down the Morag Corridor — which now cuts between Rafah and Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip only up to the Yellow Line rather than all the way to the sea as it previously did — reporter Ron Ben Yishai saw “piles of white sacks and cardboard boxes scattered all along the road.”

The deeper they went, the more he saw, he said, estimating that “there were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of tons of flour sacks and cardboard boxes, mostly containing canned goods, all intact and ready to eat.”

There was even a fully loaded trailer truck sitting deserted on the road, which IDF bulldozers had to push away to keep the corridor clear, tipping it over on its side in the process.

“Seeing the enormous amounts of discarded food, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the complaints about hunger in Gaza that had become a mantra among international aid organizations, especially the UN,” he wrote.

The soldiers had two theories about how such quantities came to be lying there unused, the reporter noted.

The first was that the cargo was not packed properly and fell off while the trucks bumped along the road.

The question raised in such a case, Ben Yishai noted, was how the international organizations in charge of aid distribution could not check to see they actually received the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of food that generous donor countries paid for.

The second theory was that “looters, Hamas members or criminal gangs from Gazan clans, boarded the trucks with the drivers’ consent and dumped their cargo while they were driving, so that their friends could pick it up and sell it,” Ben Yishai wrote — but no one collected it because the presence of Israeli soldiers in the area drove them away.

In any case, “The image of the food thrown on the side of the road does not match the photos of the walking skeletons that Hamas has flooded social media with,” he wrote.

The article also contained details of a reported American-Israeli plan to build temporary neighborhoods for Gazans on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line that would contain all necessary infrastructure such as electricity, water and sewage systems, as well as schools, medical centers and mosques.

Gazans who would move there after being screened by the Israeli authorities would be able to earn a living by clearing some of the millions of tons of rubble left by the war and reconstructing whole cities, beginning with the southernmost town of Rafah.

The report said that the IDF has already begun “clearing mines and unexploded ordnance in areas where it is already operating” so that this process can begin.

If successful in the Rafah region, the plan envisions such projects being implemented on a steady march northward, in a course of action that would take many years to complete.