Amid Gaza food distribution chaos Palestinianled group steps up

Hala Sabbah’s team has spent weeks trying to source a bag of flour in Gaza.

“We’re not finding flour - or at least clean flour. It’s all infested or mixed with sand,” she told Middle East Eye, speaking from London.

Sabbah works with a Palestinian-led mutual aid group, coordinating with local volunteers who purchase and distribute supplies in Gaza, using funds raised through the project.

Over a year ago, Sabbah and two other members of the Palestinian diaspora launched the Sameer Project - a grassroots initiative named in honour of Sabbah’s uncle, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Amid Israel’s ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2 March, which has cut off all aid and forced many NGOs to suspend their services, their work has become even more challenging.

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With flour scarce, the group has turned to rice distribution, but Sabbah is still doing all she can to find a bag of flour.

“People in Gaza really prefer bread. If you give them a plate of rice or a piece of bread, they will always take the bread,” Sabbah explained to MEE.

On Sunday, Israeli forces opened fire on starving Palestinians gathered at US-backed aid distribution points in central and southern Gaza, killing at least 35 people.

It is the latest in a series of attacks on aid seekers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a fledgling US-based initiative to distribute aid in Gaza via private contractors.

GHF's first distribution attempt on Tuesday descended into chaos, as Israeli forces killed three and wounded at least 46 others.

The GHF said its meals each contain only 1,750 calories - well below the 2,100-calorie per day minimum set by the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency meals.

For Sabbah, the contents of the GHF parcels were not just inadequate, but “offensive".

“There were no vegetables, no meat, no fruit - nothing fresh,” Sabbah said.

The entire enterprise runs starkly counter to the work she and her colleagues have been doing over the last year - working closely with Palestinians in Gaza and adapting quickly to respond to the needs of those on the ground.

Agile and flexible

Sabbah coordinates the Sameer Project with two other Palestinians living in the diaspora - California-based Lena Dajani, who organises medical aid, and an anonymous activist who runs the Instagram page, ‘Translating Falasteen’.

The trio have raised millions of dollars and coordinated with people on the ground in Gaza to respond to requests for food, medicine and emergency aid via Whatsapp groups.

With a skeleton team and a strong web of contacts, the group is agile and flexible in their approach, able to adapt quickly to the daily flurry of requests.

While Israel’s ongoing blockade has forced many international NGOs to halt or curtail their services in Gaza, the small network has doggedly pursued its work.

“Our biggest struggle is food. So, right now a plate of rice is around 8.5 dollars, with commission it adds up to over $10. This is a plate of rice that's barely enough for two people,” Sabbah said.

The project also has to contend with war profiteering by armed gangs who loot and hoard the scraps of aid that have made it past the border, reportedly under Israeli military protection. 

But the Sameer Project’s agility means they can buy products from a variety of sources, from street vendors and traders, unlike big NGOs which bring in their own aid and equipment through the border.

“These international organisations run under western frameworks are super process heavy and bureaucratic. They're not flexible, they're not agile. They don't make exceptions. They spend a lot on overhead,” Sabbah said.

“We create our own invoices, we just find a way to make it work. We don’t stall the process”.

‘Our end goal is the liberation of Palestine’

Water distribution is another urgent task. The group rents two water trucks, which transport around 100,000 litres a day from desalination plants in the north of the Strip, where Israeli attacks have destroyed much of the infrastructure.

The water costs around $46 per 1,000 litres, according to the group.

“After the [January] ceasefire, suddenly you had almost a million people move up north in the space of a week. In places like Jabalia and Beit Lahia, there’s no infrastructure whatsoever,” Sabbah told MEE.

“We made sure that we delivered to those places that are not reachable to aid organisations, that don't have wells or where the infrastructure has been completely ruined”.

Scarcity of clean water means children have to haul heavy jerry cans of water over long distances. The project recently documented a case of a child who tore his groin due to the weight of the jerry can he was carrying.

“The men of the family have to go and look for food or try to make money… so, that leaves the kids to go and get the water,” Sabbah said.

Sabbah emphasised that the project is not just driven by the urgent humanitarian demand on the ground.

The water deliveries in Gaza’s north for example, are needed to keep the areas habitable.

​“Our end goal is the liberation of Palestine and making sure that everyone stays on their land,” she said.

“So, part of our way to support people in returning to their homes, even though they’re completely destroyed, is to make sure that at least they have access to water and food”.

Putting out a fire with a drop of water

Shortages of medical supplies and personnel mean the group also has to scramble to plug the gaping holes in Gaza’s severely-damaged health system.

The group’s medical coordinator, Lena Dajani, receives some 25 critical patient referrals via Instagram and Whatsapp daily, which she passes onto a medical point at the Refaat Al Areer camp, which the project set up in central Gaza to ease the burden on the Strip’s hospitals.

The medical point then contacts the patients, and Dajani purchases the medication, which has become nearly impossible to source due to the Israeli blockade. However, by being plugged into a network of pharmacies and clinics, Dajani is still able to meet most of the requests she receives.

“For one patient, we have to call maybe 10 pharmacies to just find a simple medication, and then we only give them a month's worth, because we obviously have to spread that amount between all the patients that need immediate care,” Dajani told MEE.

The scarcity and soaring cost of medication is producing rising cases of treatable conditions.

“Epilepsy is really rampant, and they just cannot afford their seizure medication,” Dajani said.

With hunger stalking Gaza, the project has been inundated with malnutrition cases amongst children. At least 60 are reported to have died since October 2023.

“Epilepsy is really rampant, and they just cannot afford their seizure medication,”

-Lena Dajani, Sameer Project co-founder

Despite baby formula being hard to come by, the group managed to buy around $51,000 in nutritional supplements.

With the blockade and escalating Israeli attacks halting Unrwa and WHO-led efforts to control viral outbreaks across the enclave, the group now treats 300-500 patients a day for skin rashes, scabies, eye infections, and viral and bacterial diseases.

“Scabies cream is also incredibly difficult to source. You're supposed to take it over a long period of time. We're trying to put out a fire with a drop of water,” Dajani told MEE.

The project is also grappling with cases of children with respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, due to drinking contaminated water.

In one case, a three-year-old drank a bottle of detergent thinking it was water. The project rushed the child to hospital to have their stomach pumped.

Painkillers and insulin are also near impossible to source. The nerve blocker Gabapentin was being widely used as an alternative painkiller - although even this is also now unavailable.

“We had a patient who had shrapnel lodged in his brain, and it's causing him so much pain that when he's off his medication, he smashes things around him because he is in so much pain,” Dajani told MEE.

There are no wheelchairs in Gaza. Along with crutches and cochlear implants, the Israeli authorities consider them to be "dual use" items, meaning they could be used for "military purposes".

Dajani has to wait for someone to pass away in order to buy one from a medical supplier.

The chairs cost $550 each, with payment in cash - which is also difficult to come by in Gaza, with commission rates soaring to 35 percent.

“The entire healthcare system is now almost entirely being propped up by smaller groups like ours, who can source on the ground, who can take out cash at 35 percent,” Dajani said.

“Whereas the organisations with all these processes aren't standing up to Israel to allow them to operate here. We're not waiting. We're taking action”.

No case like Gaza

For Sabbah, the unravelling of the GHF came as no surprise. She said the fiasco is reflective of problems with international aid in Gaza. 

“A lot of them come in with their own agendas. They have a lot of red tape. There's a lot of things that they can’t do,” Sabbah said.

Most importantly, she noted that international organisations lack cultural sensitivity and an understanding of Gaza.

The Sameer Project had attempted to work with a US-led mutual aid group who wanted them to construct long drop toilets.

“They told us ‘We need to do long drop toilets, because this is what we do in the US, and it's the best way to do toilets',” Sabbah said.

When Sabbah explained this method was not practiced in Gaza, the group refused to work with them.

“There are always these impositions by western organisations, enforcing what they call international standards, which in reality were written by people from the West who have never experienced a genocide or a siege for 19 months,” Sabbah said.

“Our mutual aid group and a couple of others that we really trust, centre the people in Gaza,” she added. “We're not here to manage the initiative. We are here to facilitate, we're here to make sure the money gets to the right hands”.

For Sabbah and her colleagues, this is the only way to help people in Gaza, to let them dictate the aid they require, rather than having it imposed on them by NGOs headquartered in the global north.

“There's no case that is similar to Gaza,” Sabbah said. “There have been genocides that happened for long periods of time, but a siege on top of that, and also an intentional famine all happening at the same time with no one being able to leave.

“I think that, after 12 plus years of working in NGOs and international organisations, I assure you, the UN would have had massive challenges in making this work, let alone an organisation like GHF that's run by a bunch of snipers and mercenaries." 

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