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.
It's hard to exaggerate the sheer audacity - or ingenuity - that went into Ukraine's countrywide...
