U.S.-backed bombing in the Gaza Strip, along with aid restrictions by Israel, will accelerate the death toll of Palestinians there, according to new research from aid groups working in the territory.
In a report published Wednesday and led by the nonprofit Humanity and Inclusion, dozens of humanitarian organizations cited the confluence of several factors contributing to the crisis. Israel is continuing to kill and injure people with airstrikes and ground operations, even as Gaza’s dwindling stock of operating hospitals lacks supplies like hygiene materials and medical gas.
Israel’s halt on most aid deliveries is preventing aid workers from giving people sanitation supplies, worsening the spread of disease. And severe shortages of food and water have created widespread dehydration and left the entire population of the Palestinian region in “acute food insecurity,” per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification famine tracker.
Gaza’s health ministry has counted at least 54,600 Palestinian deaths during the war so far, but some outside analysts believe the true toll is tens of thousands higher.
Nineteen months since Israel invaded the strip with U.S. backing, “Palestinians in Gaza face simultaneous and intersecting crises across every sector,” the report says.
Since March 2, Israel has effectively imposed a full blockade on the region, justifying the policy by saying it is needed to pressure the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which sparked the current round of fighting with a brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed nearly 1,200 people. Issuing sweeping displacement orders and pummeling Gaza’s cities, particularly in the north, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now confined Gaza’s population to approximately 19% of its territory, the report noted.
The analysis surveyed 40 humanitarian groups working in the region between March 26 and May 9. Ninety-three percent reported that their aid stocks were nearly or fully exhausted.
Barring trucks full of supplies from entering the strip, Israel has allowed a limited trickle of supplies into Gaza since May 19. But the aid program it supports — staffed by American contractors without involvement from the humanitarian groups who have worked in the region for decades — has yet to help a significant number of Palestinians, and violence has repeatedly been reported near distribution points.
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The worsening of Gaza’s “already catastrophic man-made humanitarian crisis… will not be prevented by token and piecemeal deliveries of food parcels under any militarized supply distribution scheme,” Wednesday’s report said. It cites Israeli policies that could be reversed immediately and save lives, like maintaining only one crossing point into Gaza and limiting the inspections process so that fewer than 100 trucks are currently approved to enter the region daily.
Washington has played a major role in enabling Israeli limits on supplies for Gaza, including vital commercial goods. The Trump administration has endorsed Israel’s controversial new aid program, run by a group calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and rooted in the idea that supplies were not reaching people in need because of theft by Hamas — an assertion Israeli officials have never demonstrated through major evidence and that most aid groups and some U.S. officials have rejected.
President Donald Trump has also continued sending American bombs and other weapons to Israel, even as he and his aides have claimed they want to end the war, attempting to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and have expressed some frustration with Netanyahu.
The pattern echoes how President Joe Biden and his administration behaved, even as U.S. officials, lawmakers and independent experts worried that Washington’s approach to Gaza was violating U.S. law and international laws on human rights and warfare. On Monday, Biden’s State Department spokesperson said that it is “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes” in the Palestinian territory.
U.S.-enabled Israeli aid policies are a focus of the ongoing investigations of war crimes and genocide at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; the latter is also investigating abuses by Hamas. (The ICJ lacks jurisdiction over nonstate actors). Israel denies the charges.
Wednesday’s report includes chilling details about Gaza residents’ living conditions. A Palestinian woman reported that she and others had to cut up their clothes to use as sanitary pads “until we no longer had any clothes.”
“We replaced the diapers for our children with rags and nylon, which caused them to suffer from skin rashes and fungi that ate away at our children’s bodies, resulting in many infections,” the woman continued.
“Israel has made it almost impossible for humanitarians to do our jobs to save lives in this manufactured humanitarian catastrophe,” James Hoobler, the humanitarian policy adviser at Oxfam America, told HuffPost. “The current aid hub distribution model continues to be proven not only woefully insufficient, but deadly — all while our colleagues in Gaza are sharing that children in their families are dizzy from hunger.”
Israel is simultaneously exerting greater pressure on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu has approved new settlements in the territory — complicating any future possibility of establishing a Palestinian state there under an Israel-Palestinian peace deal — and appears to be taking steps to annex the region. His government seems increasingly determined to pursue far-right goals that the U.S. and other world powers have condemned, like claiming the two Palestinian territories are absorbed into Israel.
Facing protests over Gaza at home, some global leaders appear willing to exert more pressure on Netanyahu. Later this month, France and Saudi Arabia are hosting a conference on the so-called two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians in New York, where French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to announce that he recognizes the existence of a Palestinian state.
