AMMAN, Jordan — The main warehouse of UNRWA, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, is stacked high with tens of thousands of cardboard boxes packed with food meant to avert malnutrition in Gaza. Prevented by Israel since March from entering Gaza, some of it is going bad.
"Some of the food we have is arriving at expiration in July," said Jonathan Fowler, an UNRWA spokesperson. That includes 200,000 metric tons of flour. And while some will be distributed if needed to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, "some of it will have to be dumped," he says.
He pulls out Turkish chickpeas from a box that also includes packages of yeast, lentils, canned fish and sugar. The tens of thousands of boxes are calibrated for balanced meals and enough to feed 200,000 people for a month. All are moldering in warehouses along with even bigger quantities of food and medicine loaded on trucks that have now waited for months at Israeli border crossings.
The United States and U.S. military helped establish Jordan as the main hub for humanitarian aid to Gaza after the war between Israel and the militant group Hamas started in 2023. The kingdom is a U.S. security ally which made peace with Israel decades ago, and the Gaza border is just three hours' drive from Jordan.
In the face of increasing malnutrition in Gaza, Israel this week debuted a new mechanism to deliver limited amounts of aid to a small number of locations located in the south of Gaza. And U.N. officials say Israel has made it clear to them that it will no longer allow in aid from Jordan or neighboring Egypt.
"One of the restrictions this last week has been to only bring in goods from Israel," said Jonathan Whittall, head of the U.N.'s Office for Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza. "We haven't been able to bring our goods from Egypt and from Jordan, which has limited on the medical side specifically, what we can bring in and how quickly."
Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of goods stranded
The move leaves humanitarian goods valued by aid officials in the hundreds of millions of dollars stranded in overheated warehouses and at border crossings. Many of the aid organizations are now paying monthly storage fees for the supplies obtained through public and private donations.
Israel has alleged that Hamas was stealing aid. The U.N. — including Cindy McCain, a former U.S. ambassador and now the head of the World Food Program — along with other aid officials say Israel produced no evidence of systematic diversion of aid by Hamas. Many of the groups use proven distribution systems within Gaza built over decades.
The new aid organization, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has been widely criticized by aid officials. Few details about how the group is financed, or who works for it, have been made public.
"When you have armed personnel manning humanitarian sites, and you have people desperately hungry and in need of aid and not enough aid to meet the need, that's a very volatile combination," said Sean Carroll, president and CEO of ANERA, the biggest U.S.-based nongovernmental aid group operating in Gaza.
The first head of GHF, Jake Wood, resigned last Sunday, saying the organization was unable to operate according to humanitarian principles.
Carroll says aid groups have a combined total of more than 10 million meals waiting in trucks at Israel's Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza. Some are actually on the Gaza side but prevented by Israel from going further. Israel has blamed the United Nations for not picking it up and distributing it.
GHF's food distribution requires Palestinians in Gaza to travel to one of only a handful of access points in the south of Gaza, in contrast to aid groups that used a variety of distribution methods to deliver food throughout communities. The halt in aid shipments into Gaza has severely curtailed that.
"We've continued to make meals and deliver them, but instead of 100,000 to 150,000 a day, we've been doing 1,000 or 2,000 a day," Carroll says.
Medical supplies are at risk too
UNRWA, established after the 1948 creation of Israel to care for 700,000 Palestinian refugees forced to flee their homes by war, is the primary provider of primary health care in Gaza. Fowler said their stocks of medical supplies, including basic items such as burn ointments, had been cut to half of needed supplies in the last two months.
Claire Manera, emergency director for Doctors Without Borders, which operates emergency and other health care facilities, said the months-long ban on aid shipments has left them rationing items like antiseptics, gauze, gloves and painkillers.
"Not only have all our trucks in Jordan gone through the right approval processes but now they've been sitting for so long we are worried that some stock will expire," she said.
"Even the most very basic medical supplies that are critical when we're doing wound care and surgery are missing," she said by video call from Gaza. "You know it's heartbreaking when I'm in the hospital like I was today and you see children in agony."
The Israeli military agency overseeing access at the Gaza border told NPR it had no details on restrictions on aid from Jordan and Egypt.
A State Department spokesperson, when asked about U.N. and aid group comments that Israel was barring aid from Jordan and Egypt, said the reports were "absolutely false." The spokesperson insisted on remaining anonymous in line with department policy.
Aid groups say aside from the ban on all aid currently stored in Jordan and Egypt is the cumulative effect of Israel's rejection of items it considers of possible military use, such as water treatment chemicals.
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