Egypt’s Rafah crossing—the only viable entry point into the besieged Gaza Strip—will “hopefully” open tomorrow, World Health Organization officials said at a Thursday news conference.
The United Nations agency has supplies sufficient to care for 2,000 patients waiting on the Egyptian side of the border, with 80,000 additional pounds of supplies set to arrive over the next week, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the news conference.
The WHO is initially being allowed five truckloads of supplies, and they’re ready to go as soon as the border opens, officials said. But the organization needs assurances that those delivering them will be allowed to do so safely.
Not only would deconfliction ensure there is no loss of life during delivery, but it would also assist officials in ensuring the supplies reach civilians in need—and that they don’t fall into the hands of terrorists, Dr. Teresa Zakaria, health emergency officer for WHO, said.
Officials from various organizations and nations have said for days that the border would open imminently, to no avail. Opening the border requires cooperation from both Egypt and Israel, which each control a gate on their side, as well as Hamas, which must provide assurances that the group will not interfere.
Even if it is opened tomorrow as promised, roads have been “very badly destroyed” in the course of warfare, Dr. Michael Ryan, the organization’s executive director of health emergencies, said.
There is a “long road to go” in ensuring even a few truckloads of supplies safely make it across the border into the right hands, he said, adding: “I’ll pray—and I don’t pray very often—that the border will open tomorrow.”
Ghebreyesus said he hoped Egypt would honor the promise—but based on the country’s recent track record, the WHO is “worried whether this will happen tomorrow or not.”
“We urge those who can do it to please, please make this happen,” he said, “to avoid the tragedy in front of us.”
‘A drop in the ocean of need’
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had agreed to help the WHO deliver humanitarian supplies through the crossing on Oct. 9, Ghebreyesus previously said. Since then, a number of world leaders have made similar announcements—the latest being U.S. President Joe Biden, who said Wednesday that Al Sisi agreed to let up to 20 trucks of assistance through.
A one-time opening is a “gesture,” Ryan said Thursday, emphasizing that the border needs to be open to humanitarian aid on a daily basis.
“Twenty trucks is a drop in the ocean of need right now in Gaza,” he said, adding that continuous risk management and deconfliction guarantees were needed.
When asked about the supplies being chosen for the five trucks the WHO has been allotted, Ryan replied, “You get to send 20 trucks into a situation where 2.5 million people are thirsty, without food, without water, without medicine. Would you like to be choosing … who gets the boxes?”
“It shouldn’t be 20 trucks, it should be 2,000 trucks,” he said, “and we shouldn’t have to be making these choices.”
Still, choices are being made, in concert with officials from the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN, he said—”awful choices.”
The list of supplies set to be delivered on the first run “doesn’t make for easy reading,” Ryan said. They include amputation kits, intubation kits, pneumothorax kits for punctured lungs, external fixators for broken bones, wound dressings, anesthetics, and pain killers.
It’s “all the stuff we’d expect when we get sick, we get hurt, we crash our car on the way home—all of what would be available to us,” he said. “There are probably trucks pulling up to hospitals all over the world tonight with all of this stuff. It’s unfortunate that there are no trucks pulling up to hospitals in Gaza tonight with all of that stuff.”
But the area has far more needs, including fuel to run desalination plants, bakeries, and hospitals—Gaza “technically ran out a few days ago,” Ryan said, and is conserving a small amount that was scrounged up; insulin for diabetics; medicine for cancer patients; and bags to collect donor blood, of all things.
Earlier this week WHO officials had warned that there was only one week’s supply of blood in Gaza. But that’s not for lack of donors, Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative for Gaza, said Thursday. It’s due to the lack of supplies with which to collect the blood.
The idea that the Gaza area is approaching some kind of cliff it’s about to fall off of, due to the continually deteriorating humanitarian situation, is an incorrect picture, Ryan said.
“We passed the cliff edge long ago. We’re collectively careening toward the ground.”
