For JN April 2024
This week’s World Central Kitchen tragedy and the death of seven foreign aid workers “could have been prevented”, according to an experienced humanitarian aid entrepreneur, and a senior American former general.
Moti Kahana is an American-Israel businessman who heads the humanitarian aid agency GDC (Global Development Company), which provides logistical support and services to governments and non-profits. He has worked in numerous theatres of war, including Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan, to rescue civilians and provide vital equipment, goods and services.
Kahana says that — together with an American high-level security company — he presented a plan to Israel two months ago, which would have seen aid safely delivered to Palestinians in Gaza.
The detailed plan, which Jewish News has seen, envisages the creation of “gated communities” in a safe space in the Strip, and biometric recognition put in place for civilian recipients of aid. Local Palestinian contractors on the ground would help with the handing over of the aid. The proposed cost is around $200 million for six months’ work.
Kahana told JN: “Israel has had this plan on the table for more than two months. We have had several meetings at the highest level to present the plan and go over the ideas. The army was in favour, and we have been waiting for the green light — but when we asked if we could go ahead, we were told, — by the Prime Minister’s Office — ‘what’s the rush?’”
The plan goes into considerable detail of the advantages of using private companies to deliver the aid, noting that in some cases food packages have been destroyed because they were shown to have come from Israel.
The GDC/American plan says that “the use of a private company mitigates a negative perception of Israeli government involvement, [by] providing a middleman, while demonstrating the Israeli government’s willingness to support humanitarian assistance”.
The scheme provides “a secure logistics chain to mitigate the risk of contraband entering Gaza”, and envisages the security company “co-ordinating directly with the IDF regarding approved warehouses, ports, entry points, inspection points, security rules of engagement, convoy routes, border crossings to be used, and approved distribution points”.
The gated communities are described as a Secure Humanitarian Logistics Corridor, which, the plan says, “once established, [it]can process and securely deliver humanitarian assistance from other sources across Gaza”.
The idea, according to the plan presented to Israel, would be to phase in the delivery of aid. Initially, there would be “mass food and water deliveries to alleviate hunger, and restore civil order to those areas, then progressively expand food aid into Gaza and eventually re-establish warehouses”.
One of those supportive of the scheme is Palestinian political analyst Samer Sinijlawi, who told JN that “there is a Palestinian interest in general, to see international organisations have operations of humanitarian aid in Gaza. Now Gaza is on the edge of famine, people are starving. The tragedy of the World Central Kitchen was that they had just entered Gaza, with the full co-ordination of the Israeli army, and they were hit and killed.
“Now important countries, which were financing humanitarian aid, like the Emirates, have declared that they will stop their involvement. People are trying to save lives in Gaza, but there is a lack of understanding on the Israeli side that this is something important.”
Palestinians would very much like to see organisations such as Kahana’s going into Gaza and providing much-needed food and provisions, he said. Sinijlawi said he had seen the joint GDC and American plan and believed that “I can trust these organisations, they have worked intensively in 40 or 50 countries and have done an excellent job. If they have succeeded elsewhere they should succeed in Gaza. It’s a political challenge, now — but the decision-maker in Israel needs to allow it.”
He did not believe the two companies would have any problem in hiring local Palestinians to help deliver the aid. “People, logistics, equipment — that can be done. But they (GDC and the Americans) need to be there physically. It cannot be more urgent. We should be worried about every hour that we lose, not every day.”