What Went Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? - with Yotam Polizer

Before today's episode, an important announcement.

Over the past few weeks, I'm sure many of you have noticed me mentioning that we're developing some new programming with Arc Media's contributors, Nadavayal and Amit Segel.

It's a milestone for us as we've been trying to figure out how to invest in the future of this podcast, which has been a project that we never imagined would play such a meaningful role for so many of you as you have expressed to us through your thoughtful feedback.

Now, if you have a minute, let me take you back to the beginning.

beginning.

We started the podcast a few years ago coming out of the pandemic, focused on a range of geopolitical and economic topics.

Some episodes were about Israel, but certainly not all of them.

On the morning of October 7th, that changed.

Ilan and I pivoted to making this podcast about Israel's war and the rapidly changing landscape for Jews around the world.

We were doing what we felt was desperately needed, getting accurate information and thoughtful analysis from people on the ground rather than an American interpretation of what was unfolding 6,000 miles away.

It was also our way of processing those very traumatic days, and we had no idea how intense this winding story would turn out to be.

Hundreds of Hamas terrorists streaming in and massacring people at will.

240 people were taken hostage.

They went into people's homes and they butchered children.

The bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

The goal was now to destroy the Chambal Sushi.

Hezbollah is sitting on 200,000 rockets.

I have one word: don't.

Those hostages were executed before they were found by the IDF.

Most of these kids on the encampments right now are trying to tell us that there is no Jewish indigenuity in the land of Israel.

The response in the United States was: the Jews deserved it.

They like us as victims.

What the world is not comfortable with is a fighting Jew.

These pagers blew up almost at once.

Hezbollah took a shellacking of the Walkie-Talkis, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah.

Yuchi Sinwa, the leader of Hamas, was killed by the IDF.

Israel would never allow a Muslim country to have a nuclear weapon in the Middle East.

Six bunker buster bombs hit Isfahan, Natans, and Fordu.

Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.

Israeli society is going to be faced with a very stark choice.

October 6th or October 8th.

As we continue to navigate through this historical period, your emails expressing appreciation for the sanity and clarity of the voices you hear on Call Me Back have been our guide.

Thousands of you wrote in to say that the show offered an escape from a world that seemed to have turned hostile overnight.

Students in America's top universities openly calling to globalize the intifada.

Mobs in Sydney chanting gas the Jews.

International media, experts and politicians questioning the very legitimacy of the Jewish state.

For those of us born after World War II, it has never felt lonelier to be a Jew.

We've never felt more alienated.

But here's the thing, and I can tell you this with confidence because I have our show's data in front of me.

You are not alone.

This show is reaching millions all over the world.

One listener said to us that for his community, Call Me Back has become like a bat signal for Jews and their non-Jewish friends, reminding them that there is reason for hope.

We may be from different backgrounds and armed with different opinions, but we all share the same story.

So far, Arc Media has been entirely self-funded.

I don't and won't profit from it.

That was simple enough in the early days when it was a two-man operation, just Elon and me.

But as our audience grew, so did our expectations.

We're no longer just a single podcast.

We've added two more podcasts to Arc Media, for heaven's sake, and what's your number?

So we now have a full team of editors, designers, and producers, all of whom are both committed and essential to what we want this platform to become a town square for the Jewish people.

To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we are launching Inside Call Me Back, which is a weekly premium Call Me Back episode where Amit Segel, Nadave Yal, and myself will answer questions from subscribers that go deeper than usual.

We want to bring you into the type of casual conversations we typically have after the tape stops rolling.

These subscriber-only episodes will rotate weekly between Amit, Nadav, and myself, with Elan serving up your questions that you send in.

For $8 a month, you'll join us on a weekly basis for a more intimate conversation where your input and ideas will help shape the episode.

If you value the Call Me Back podcast, this is your way to support our mission.

To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or go to arcmedia.org.

That's A-R-Kmedia.org.

Our first episode will drop on Thursday, August 7th.

You are listening to an Art Media podcast.

The idea of GHF was to deliver aid directly to the people, not with big convoys, not with big trucks, but directly food packages per person, per family.

The idea was not in the big population.

The idea was that the people will come to get the aid, which is obviously, especially in a war zone, is a big issue of safety and security.

And we're reaching a pretty extreme situation from a humanitarian perspective.

It's 12 p.m.

on Sunday, August 3rd in New York City.

It's 7 p.m.

on Sunday, August 3rd in Israel, as Israelis and Jews around the world mark Tishabav, in which many have been or will be fasting for 25 hours.

On Friday, Hamas released horrifying videos of Israeli hostage Eviatar David, which showed an utterly emaciated Eviatar being forced to dig his own grave in a tunnel in Gaza.

This came just a day after Palestinian Islamic Jihad published a video of another Israeli hostage, Ram Broslevsky, whom the Palestinian Islamic Jihad has said they've lost contact with since filming this video.

On Saturday night, roughly 10,000 Israelis rallied at hostage square in Tel Aviv, where relatives of Ram and Eviatar spoke to the crowd.

Thousands more protested a block away outside the entrance to the IDF's headquarters, and many others gathered in various spots spots around the country.

This comes as negotiations for a hostage ceasefire deal seem to have hit a dead end, despite the fact that U.S.

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff is in Israel right now trying to salvage the situation.

With hostage talks stalling, IDF Chief of Staff Ayel Zamir pleaded with the cabinet members, according to some reports, during a meeting this week to present a strategy for the Army to proceed with in Gaza.

And of course, all of this is happening as global attention remains focused on a food crisis in Gaza, which will be our topic for today's episode.

In response to this crisis, Israel has ramped up humanitarian trucks into Gaza and has resumed aid airdrops.

To discuss how the distribution of aid has been and perhaps should be executed, we are joined by Yotam Pulitzer.

Yotam is the global CEO of Israel Aid, the largest humanitarian aid organization in Israel, which is active in 12 other countries as well, in addition to Israel.

And since October 7th, Israel has worked to rehabilitate Israeli victims of the Hamas attack and has helped facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid and medical support to civilians in Gaza.

Yotam is the 2023 Charles Bromfman Award Laureate.

He joins us today from Israel.

Yotam, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Don.

There are a lot of burning questions which led to this current crisis and what can be done to solve it.

You are probably one of the most uniquely positioned people to help us understand this issue because there are so many threads to it, some of which are clear, most of which are not.

So I just want to set the table here by first giving our listeners the opportunity to understand you and what you do to understand where you come at this issue.

So let's just start with who you are and what Israel aid does.

My personal background is that I grew up in a small moshav up in the Galilee near Tzfat.

My dad is a social worker.

My mom was a school counselor.

After my IDF service, I did what every Israeli do.

You know, I followed followed the Khumus trail and I found myself in India and then in Nepal, fell in love with the country and I started to volunteer for a Jewish NGO called Tavel Betzedek.

For our listeners who don't appreciate this, what Yotam is describing is a very common path for young Israelis when they finish the army and they often go to parts of Asia or elsewhere and they do backpacking for long stretches of time and many wind up volunteering.

Exactly.

Yes, I ended up staying for three and a half years.

Oh, wow.

So that's a bit more than the average Israeli.

But then I went back to Israel and wanted to start my life.

And two weeks after I went back for my backpacking trip was the tsunami in Fukushima, where 20,000 people lost their lives.

And I'm sure you all remember these kind of surreal images of a 120-foot wave of tsunami washing away everything.

Israel, which was a tiny organization at that time with one staff member, invited me to lead this relief mission to Fukushima.

And I said, you know, why not?

I ended up staying for three years.

I met my wife there.

And not important, but very important information.

We call it disaster dating.

You know, there's many dates that turn into disaster and some disaster turn into a date.

The joke is she's now Japanese.

And then basically, my journey led me to kind of lead a lot of relief missions.

And I've been to more than 12 different relief missions, but the ones that I think are relevant for this call, one kind of big operation we had that I led was in Greece during the Syrian civil war.

And, you know, I'm sure Dan, you remember these images of hundreds of thousands of Syrians coming on these tiny rubber boats to Greece.

And then, you know, the first people they see was this group of Israelis.

We We had a team of both Israeli Jews and Arabs working together, providing medical aid.

And I realized at that time that, again, the work is about saving lives, but there's also an opportunity to build bridges.

And I have a lot of stories on that.

One day I remember a boat that capsized just before it reached the shore.

We were able to, that day, we were able to pull everyone out.

And I was carrying this cute Syrian girl.

She was shivering and shaking my hands.

And I'm not a doctor, so I handed her over to our Arab-Israeli doctor who treated her.

But her father stared at me and he was shocked because he clearly never saw an Israeli person in his life.

And he saw this organization called Israid, so it's pretty clear where we're from.

And he told me something I always quote.

He said, my worst enemy became my biggest supporter.

And the people who are supposed to protect me back home in Syria are chasing me away.

And to me, it was the first time that I realized that through this terrible tragedy in Syria, and we're going to talk about Gaza, which is also a terrible, terrible tragedy, we have an opportunity again, not just to save lives, but also to build bridges and change people's perspective.

The other mission that I should mention is actually not that long ago, in the summer of 2021, exactly four years ago in August, the fall of Kabul.

I was speaking about crazy images, you remember these people hanging on the wings of the planes, trying to flee for safety because they were chased by the Taliban.

We're talking about people who collaborated with the Americans.

We had diplomats.

And then they reached out to us, to Israel, to see if we can help pull them out of Afghanistan.

Long story short, I found myself on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan for two months.

We realized that many of these girls that we tried to take out didn't have passports.

So we were able, through Sally Oren,

the ex-wife of Ambassador Michael Oren, who was a good friend in Washington of the wife of the former Afghan ambassador.

She contacted her and he actually printed out passports for us and we transferred them to these girls.

The most important part maybe of this operation was that we needed a country to take them.

I mean, eventually they were going to the U.S.

or Canada, but we needed a transit place for them.

And we were able to reach out to Muhammad Benzai, the crown prince in Abu Dhabi.

It was just a few months after the Abraham Accords.

And then when he heard that there's a group of Israelis taking out Afghan girls, he immediately said, bring them over.

And the Emiratis tweeted, and I quote, they said, it's the first humanitarian mission of the Abraham Accords.

Now I'm jumping to the present.

We're now actually launching an interesting partnership with the UAE.

So again, these kind of connections and partnerships go a really long way.

But we've never worked in Israel or in Gaza until October 7.

Meaning it was an Israeli organization focused externally on Israelis coming to help disaster relief, humanitarian assistance for people under siege, people in crisis elsewhere, not inside Israel.

So October 7th was the first time you were internally focused.

We call it the humanitarian wing of the startup nation.

The idea was to bring aid from Israel to the world.

And it's not because everything is perfect in Israel.

As you know better than many others, Dan, we have this expertise because of our challenges, right?

Because of the water water scarcity, because of the ongoing conflict and trauma, because of the trauma of the Holocaust, we developed these water technologies or trauma counseling programs.

So the goal of Israel was to bring this expertise to the world's most vulnerable communities.

It started as a disaster relief organization.

We are known to be these michigan Israelis jumping on planes and arriving in the first 72 hours.

But very quickly, we realized that that's kind of like putting a band-aid.

And yes, it's important to be there first on the ground, but it's even more important to stay and work with communities for long-term recovery.

So now out of the 12 countries where we operate, in addition to Israel, we stay for very long.

I mean, in South Sudan, one of the worst affected crises in the world that unfortunately nobody talks about in the media, we've been there for almost 14 years to rebuild community.

And specifically there, we are helping women who survive gender-based violence.

So yeah, we never worked in Israel, but then October 7 was obviously a whole different story.

And in the morning of October 8th, while we were still, I guess like Qudan, I guess like everyone in Israel and many in in the Jewish community, we were trying to look for our loved ones.

But we realized that in such a complex humanitarian crisis in Israel, we have to respond.

And we responded massively.

And it's probably one of our largest emergency responses to date.

We raised about $20 million just for supporting survivors of October 7th.

And is your funding all from private philanthropy?

Primarily, we don't get Israeli government funding.

And that's, by the way, enables us to work in places where maybe the government wouldn't be able to.

And we really want to keep our non-political, non-governmental agenda.

We get a lot of support from private individuals, from family foundations, but also from maybe kind of unusual actors.

We do get some funding from the UN, specifically UNICEF has been a long-term partner of ours.

We get some funding from the Mormon Church.

They're very, very generous and very professional in their approach.

So, on the morning of October 8th, when we were looking for our loved ones and making sure that our team members are safe, so we sent our team to the Dead Sea because, you know, the Dead sea and a lot these two kind of big areas of hotels became again for lack of a better term became like one big refugee camp the people there who suffered the worst atrocities on october 7 they were there and they were so traumatized and we arrived i remember to this hotel that was um hosting kibbutz bayari you know one of the one of the kibbutz team that suffered the worst the highest number of casualty actually

and more than 100 people were murdered on october 7 and many were kidnapped i never imagined that we will work at home and that we will be needed at home.

Since our establishment, we worked in 64 countries.

So we will need all these expertise from 64 countries to bring it back home to our darkest moment and how much long-term support they will need from organization like us.

Okay, so the story of humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza, not the Israel part, but the Gaza part, took a very dramatic turn in April when it was announced that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would take over from the UN for getting aid, humanitarian aid into Gaza.

What was happening before April that was so problematic that warranted or invited or catalyzed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation coming in?

So maybe I'll start by sharing what we actually did in Gaza because, and by the way, Dan, full disclosure, this is the first time that I'm sharing this publicly.

We didn't share it until now because of security concerns for partners, but we were watching, you know, while we were responding in Israel, we were watching how the humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Gaza.

And quite frankly, I didn't think that we can make an impact.

We can't be boots on the ground in Gaza providing aid.

But then I think around February, March, but in April of 2024, April 1st, 2024, Dan, you remember what happened was the terrible, terrible incident of the aid workers from World Central Kitchen.

The seven aid workers who were accidentally killed by the IDF.

These are people that we actually knew.

I mean, I knew three of the seven.

We worked with them in Ukraine.

We worked with them in Puerto Rico.

WCK, World Center Kitchen, again, for people who don't know in Israel or in the Jewish world, they actually also supported people affected by October 7th.

So they supported in Israel as well.

Personally, that was when it really hit me and I understood that we have to get involved.

And I realized that our unique positioning of being both Israeli and understanding Israel's security concerns, but also being humanitarian and understanding how humanitarian aid work, how the humanitarian community works, is actually a huge added value.

I think when people think about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, they don't understand the complexity.

They don't understand that the need to balance between Israel's security concerns, which are real, and the humanitarian concerns are also real and have been real for a very long time, even way before, you know, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and others.

So the need to balance between these two is almost impossible, but there's no other way than working on this together.

So we became sort of this connector and facilitator between the humanitarian community and Israel.

And our idea was to try to solve problems.

You know, organization would call us and tell us, like, we are trying to bring this aid.

It didn't get the approval.

Can you help us?

Can you help us with custom clearance?

We also have to remember that the policy towards aid in Gaza changed.

many times during the war.

Can you just give the range of what it means to change, what it means to go from X to Y?

Absolutely.

In the beginning, after October 7, the policy was that aid would only come in through Rafah crossing, okay, through Egypt.

Then when the Rafah operation started in May 2024, the Egyptians closed Rafah crossing and then all the aid would come from Israel.

Okay, so when it was coming through the Rafah crossing, the aid was coming from Egypt, but it wasn't only coming from Egypt, meaning everyone who was supplying aid was supplying it through Egypt.

In the beginning, it was coming through Egypt.

And again, just to be clear, even when it's coming from Egypt, it's still scanned by Israel.

So it's not just coming from Egypt, it's still scanned for security purposes.

Okay, got it.

And then a few months later, Israel started to open the different crossings.

First, it was one crossing, then another one, then a third one.

Then, of course, I don't know if you remember, again, it seems like a different lifetime.

There was the attempt initiated by the US government, but with a close work with Israel of the peer.

Yeah, the peer.

The short-lived peer.

Short-lived peer, $320 million that, you know, I can't tell you how much actual aid we can deliver with this money, but it was a tragedy.

But again, it was an attempt, the same thing.

It was an an attempt to balance between security needs and humanitarian needs.

And that didn't work out, as we all know.

So the pier failed.

The Rafa distribution got disrupted by the IDF operation in Rafah, which means the IDF said, let's move the distribution entrance through where?

So we have to Gaza, you know, three main crossings.

We have Karem Shalom, which is the main one, which is in the south of Gaza, not too far from Rafa.

And we have two main crossings in the north, what we call Eres and Zikim, next to the coast.

And you have other crossings like Kisufim and others that are along the lines, but they're not used frequently for, again, for security purposes.

The aid is coming from multiple places around the world.

It could come to Ashdod port.

For instance, we just helped facilitate a ship that came from the UAE to Ashdod port.

It could come from Jordan.

Jordan and Israel have worked very closely together on facilitating aid from Jordan and then it comes by land from Amman to the Allenby crossing and then to one of these crossings.

And sometimes Israel is actually accompanying these trucks that are coming from Jordan because there's a lot of sensitivity with them.

The source of aid, for example, in some point of the war during the war, you weren't allowed to buy aid in Israel and deliver it to Gaza.

And for the last year or more, it's actually recommended by the Israeli authorities to procure the aid in Israel.

Why?

Because you can be more controlled, you can minimize the smuggling, and you can also do it more quickly and smoothly to some extent.

So, these changes came in and out constantly.

So, then we are getting before April, before the GHF, we had the last hostage deal in January, 42 days.

And I think it's very important to understand what happened during these 42 days.

Because I remember two hours after the deal was signed, I got a call from a top commander in the IDF that we coordinate between them and the humanitarian community.

And he said, We need your help to bring all the humanitarian community again.

He knew that we are playing this facilitator role.

He said, because now Israel has to allow 600 trucks a day, which is actually much more than the amount of trucks that came before October 7.

And bringing 600 trucks a day is quite an operation.

And that was important, of course, for two reasons.

One, to address the humanitarian needs, and second, for Israel to comply with the deal and for all of us to see our hostages return every Shabbat.

I remember these images because our office is just across the street from Hostage Square.

Just to remind our listeners, hostages were being returned every Saturday.

And that was part of the deal.

It was basically every week.

And so, to keep that moving, they had to keep that moving.

That was Israel's role.

Israel part was to allow 600 trucks of aid, which was a huge effort from Israel and from the humanitarian community.

And there was a very, again, positive collaboration because we shared mutual goals to support the civilian population in Gaza and to release the hostages.

The 600 trucks that came in every day was brought in by the humanitarian community.

And I saw people working, you know, 28 hours a day to make it work.

Then every weekend we saw our hostages released.

And it was, of course, you know, a breath of air for all of us.

And also we saw in Gaza, a lot of people were getting the food that they were desperate for and the aid that they were desperate for for a long time.

And Gaza was, again, for lack of a better term, and a lot of people are using this term, but I think it's important.

Gaza was flooded with aid at that time.

Then 42 days passed.

The ceasefire collapsed.

The first thing that Israel declared, and that was the the stated policy so this is not any theory that me or anyone is saying israel declared that nothing will come in and that was of course part of the negotiation for the next part of the hostage deal

the next time aid was coming in again into gaza was in late may Okay, but just stay right there.

When Israel said nothing's coming in, I do recall also at the time that the government, and it seemed to be supported by many outside the government, was arguing that based on the 600 trucks a day, there was a lot of oversupply, if you will, that could last the Gazan population.

That was exactly what the government said.

The argument was that the 600 trucks that came in every day during the 42 days of ceasefire was actually more than the aid that came in at the six months previous to the ceasefire.

But we also need to remember, and I think that's also important, is that the average Gazans live in a tent in one of the internally displaced camps in the south or in the north, they probably thought the war is over.

And even if they wanted to stock up supplies, i'm talking about the average gazan like the gaza grandmother that has 10 children you know she didn't stock up supplies she didn't know that the war was going to resume yeah exactly right and that's i think one of the biggest tragedies and and points that are important to understand when we reach the situation today and how we're reaching a pretty extreme situation from humanitarian perspective But when all this food was being supplied in, the Israeli government expected the average Gazans to stock up?

I don't know.

I'm not part of the government.

I don't know whether they thought the ceasefire will collapse, whether they thought Hamas would come to a second part of the deal.

I don't know if they knew, but that's unfortunately what happened.

So during the time that Gaza is being flooded with aid, this is the ceasefire period, basically the 42 days.

There's also videos of aid trucks being taken over by armed Gazans.

Who are the people looting those trucks and what happened to those supplies?

Because you said a moment ago that the average Gazan didn't plan for the ceasefire to end, so didn't didn't stock up food on the one hand.

On the other hand, there was excess food relative to the needs at the exact time.

And it just may be that that excess food was not getting to Gazans because based on what we were seeing from these images, these aid trucks were being hijacked.

Look, the issue of looting of aid in Gaza was not just during the ceasefire.

It's an issue that both the humanitarian community, the UN, the NGOs, and the Israeli authorities, the IDF are dealing with for a very long time.

And it's a huge challenge.

I want to take one step back to explain this to people because I think it's very important.

We worked in Syria, okay?

In the case of Syria, the active fighting area and the place where all the refugees were were very, very far.

Most Syrians either left the country to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, which is where we met them, or even within Syria, they went far away.

In Afghanistan, they went to Pakistan, they went to other refugee camps.

Even in Iraq, where we, by the way, also operated under the radar, the Yazidi survivors survivors of the massacre of ISIS, they went to the Kurdish region, so very far, a few hundred kilometers from the active fighting area.

So, Gaza is different.

People can't run away, and the different armed groups, including Hamas and others, are within the population, and we know that.

Going back to the issue of looting, there are different kinds of looting, and that's not me saying that will be the IDF telling you that, and people who are more expert than me in intelligence.

We have looting for commercial purposes, because we knew, especially when there was scarcity, that if you take over a truck, you can sell it.

We've seen, you know, the Hebrew University professor talking about the research that he just did about the prices of flour in Gaza that reached almost $2,000 for 25 kg a couple of weeks ago.

So looting for commercial purpose happens.

There's something that the UN is calling spontaneous distribution, which is again, basically saying that mass of people, usually desperate, are taking over a truck and are just distributing it and grabbing whatever they can.

So we also see that.

And of course there's also diversion by armed group, including terror organizations, including Hamas.

It's hard to know who is who in every certain point of time.

And for us as humanitarian, it's a huge concern because what we want to make sure is that the aid actually reaches the civilian population.

And there's no perfect solution for that.

Nothing that was tried until now worked perfectly.

But we have seen periods where, again, according to not my statistics, but the IDF statistic, we've seen a lot less looting and that more aid would reach the civilians.

One of the things that worked well was community kitchens and bakeries.

So instead of having, you know, just mass distribution in warehouses, you actually give fresh food to the people, which is also more nutritious.

So there were periods of time during this war where we had, I think, almost 200 community kitchens operating all across Gaza.

That was a coordination between the UN, the NGOs, and Israel.

And again, we always hear about how toxic this relation is, but what people don't understand is how much collaboration and daily work is actually happening and how many hours and resources are invested on both sides.

So now the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

So what were your initial thoughts when you learned of it?

And again, just describe what it was trying to accomplish.

Just give us a little explainer here.

The GHF specifically, the idea, the intention behind it, that's what was declared by Israel and by the U.S.

that endorse it, was to separate the aid, the civilian aid from Hamas.

Just a full disclaimer, we are not part of the GHF mechanism, not formally or informally, but we do think the only way is to engage and to talk to everyone.

Our goal was to be sort of the connector, the facilitator, to help create a bridge basically between the humanitarian needs and the security concerns.

And when GHF was introduced, I was sitting in the room with the people who started GHF trying to understand what that would look like.

The level of desperation, I think that's something that we were all shocked by.

You know, when the GHF opened their site, we saw hundreds of thousands of people, you know, trying to grab whatever they can.

Also, one challenge, and this is a challenge that was pointed by the people at the GHF themselves that I said in the room,

the first four sites that they opened were geographically in the south.

So it meant by definition that the north part of Gaza, where about half of the population is currently located, will not have access to the GHF site.

So it was clear, I think, to the GHF people and to us as well that we need this sort of parallel mechanism to work.

And I think until we're able to do that, we'll continue to see the looting on both sides and the desperation of people and the extreme challenges of crowd control and the horrific stories of people losing their life trying to get aid at the GHF sites and whether it's crossfire between Israel and Hamas.

So it's clear that the system doesn't work as it should be.

That's why the prime minister, and I think he took the right decision, he basically said we need all hands on deck you know he called out to countries to come and participate and i'm watching every day more countries are joining this effort that's in the recent days and weeks yeah we're talking about the recent days and weeks if we look at the timeline again if ghjf was introduced then the parallel mechanism was introduced of the un but it was gradual there was already a deficit of aid in gaza especially in specific areas that did not get the aid, not just because Israel did not facilitate the aid, but also because of the looting.

our concern as humanitarian is always the most vulnerable who are the most vulnerable in gaza children elderly disabled pregnant women people who can't reach either the ghf or or the un or the humanitarian mechanism so we always thought how can we make sure we reach the most vulnerable we saw that when there is complementing mechanism parallel mechanism we start to see and it will probably take some time we'll start to see less looting and closing the gap and why will there be less looting we do believe, and it's not just us, again, we heard it from multiple sources in the IDF and others, that one reason for looting, not the only one, is an issue of supply and demand, because a lot of the looting is for commercial purposes.

So if we have flooding to the market at this point, we can reduce some of the looting.

That's our understanding, and that's what we're advocating for.

And this is not a perfect solution, Dan.

It seems to me that one of the concerns, coming back to this, the idea is to get the aid to the Gaza and Palestinians, civilians without it getting to Hamas.

I still don't understand.

What was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation doing differently that it believed would allow them to accomplish that goal?

The methodology of delivering aid in Gaza was mainly through big convoys of trucks going into the population centers

and distributing there.

So what GHF tried to do.

And when you go into the big population centers, Hamas is in the big population centers, so they can just intercept the aid there.

Yes, the the idea that once it's in the population center, the control and the monitoring is much more complex.

The idea of GHF was to deliver aid directly to the people, not with big convoys, not with big trucks, but directly food packages per person, per family.

But not in the big population centers.

The idea was not in the big population.

The idea was that the people will come to get the aid, which is obviously, especially in a war zone, is a big issue of safety and security.

They have to work there in an active war zone.

They have to to work there in a place where we know that there's a lot of active fighting between hamas and israel and other armed groups that are also in the area for some people they have to walk really really far to get to it we also believe and i i alluded to it before that in gaza it's very important to be able to bring cooked food for people because when you talk about malnutrition it's also you know something that people don't know you don't just solve it by flour and rice people need nutrition when people are getting to severe malnutrition, they need protein, they need vitamins, they need all the other things that, quite frankly, you can only get with cooked food.

Many people don't have the place to cook in their tents.

We have to remember that.

So they can take the food package from GHF or from elsewhere, get to the tent, but then it's difficult.

Why is that challenge that you're describing unique to the GHF approach?

In other words, I would think that would be the same problem in the way aid was distributed up until April.

In the case of other aid organization, including including the UN, including World Central Kitchen and others, they operated hundreds of community kitchens all across Gaza so people would get cooked food.

It doesn't mean that that mechanism worked perfectly either.

So going back to the GHF, they launched.

It was extremely challenging.

It wasn't serving the whole population.

Why was it not serving the whole population?

First of all, from a geographic perspective, They just operated in the south and in the center.

And why didn't they operate in the north, north Gaza?

I don't know if it's a funding issue.

I don't know if they wanted to do a soft pilot to a new idea, to a new concept.

You need more than that, because what we saw was these images of, you know, hundreds of thousands of desperate people trying to get aid, the crowd control, the access, the active fighting, multiple, multiple challenges.

Okay, so what is the operational solution here to address this crisis now?

Like what should be done right now?

I think there's been a lot of problems with GHF clearly, some problems, challenges revealed.

There are challenges with the way the situation was working even in the early months, some of which you've described.

So if you were to design an operational solution now to address this crisis, what should be done now?

So there were a lot of challenges.

including people losing their lives in some of these distribution sites, which is something that should never happen at an A distribution.

And, you know, this is the do no harm approach for us is as holy as it can be.

But what needs to happen now is two things.

One, and that's by the way, the role that we are trying to take here.

We're trying to bring everyone together, all the different actors, the GHF, the UN, the NGOs, which again, we always hear about the UN, but there are hundreds of NGOs.

I spoke about World Central Kitchen, but there are many others that are operating.

The IDF, specifically COGAT unit, who is coordinating that.

The Gulf countries, the donor countries, everyone needs to come together and we need to provide aid from multiple locations and multiple sources and multiple methodologies because that's the only thing that could work to address this acute crisis.

We also need to remember that severe malnutrition that we are seeing in some areas of Gaza, especially in the north, there's a need for medical intervention.

You need this nutritional supplements, some case medical care.

So people talk about the food, but it's not just a food crisis.

The crisis is on multiple levels.

And what we are trying to do here is not just support the facilitation of the food, but we are also supporting doctors and and nurses that are coming from other countries into Gaza.

We are supporting water desalination systems with another partner to provide access to clean water.

We're supporting some partners that are operating field hospitals to support the people who have been severely malnutritioned.

So I'll share one story down that kind of helped, you know, pretty early in the war.

But this is a good example.

Pretty early in the war, there was an organization that we worked with in Ukraine and South Sudan, and they wanted to operate a field hospital in Gaza.

Now, we all heard that there was a lot of active fighting in the big government hospitals.

So we, Israel, and of course the humanitarian community needed field hospitals to support the people because they didn't have access to medical care.

Now, in order to build a hospital, you need to bring a lot of items that are considered by Israel dual-use items.

Most obvious example is an oxygen concentrator.

You know, oxygen concentrator, very basic in every medical facility, but in the wrong hands, it could use for explosives.

So, how do you actually solve that?

How do you allow these things to go into Gaza?

Because if it falls in the wrong hands, we are in trouble and people could get killed.

The only way to solve it, there's no rocket science, is you sit in the same room, you build trust, you deconflict the area.

Deconflict means you find an area that is safe according to the IDF, you monitor, and you scan the things before they come in, and that's how you can get things done.

And this field hospital is actually now the largest field hospital in Gaza that has treated tens of thousands of people because we were able to reach this middle ground.

From my perspective, what works is that when we are working quietly, we try to tone down the noise on all sides, by the way, here, and really try to focus on solution-oriented to a very acute crisis because Gaza is like nowhere else.

What do you mean?

Gaza is like nowhere else where you have the civilian population and the active fighting in the same condensed area.

It doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

Okay.

Was Israel Aid ever considered as the operator before the GHF solution was introduced?

Look, I think our position is not we can't be boots on the ground in Gaza as an organization called Israelid, maybe someday.

Meaning, because Israel is in your name?

Because Israel is in our name.

We're registered in Israel.

We don't want to risk anyone's, not from our team and not from people who work with us.

And that's why I also kept in this conversation all of our partners on the ground.

When we work with more than 10 different organizations that are all vetted by the IDF, I kept them quietly because we don't want to put anyone's lives at risk.

So, a lot of what we're doing right now is serving as a logistical hub.

So, if an organization wants to bring medicine into Gaza, we will buy this medicine in Israel and we'll help deliver it to the crossing, again, with the approval and the coordination from the IDF, and they will pick it up from the crossing and bring it to the field hospital.

And we're seeing now, maybe because the crisis has reached sort of a new low, we're seeing a lot of people joining our effort, which is very heartening, including a lot of people in the Jewish communities from federations to synagogues to organizations that I think was...

In the diaspora.

In the diaspora and in Israel too.

In Israel too, we see hospitals, we see professional people, I think, want to help more now.

They want to make sure that the aid actually reaches the people.

Is there any solution to separating Hamas from the civilian population, at least when it comes to getting aid to the civilian population?

I mean, one would think, okay, so let's just focus on this problem that's unique to Gaza and try to solve it.

Or is it the only one of its kind because it's impossible to solve?

And so that's why it persists.

It's impossible to solve.

I don't think there's a perfect solution, Dan, but I think when you are vet the people that you work with on the ground, when you vet the partners that you work with.

When you say vet the partners, what do you mean by that?

Because we are hearing constantly reporting about how some of these partners had Hamas embedded in them or they were embedded in Hamas and they had employees that were part of Hamas.

So many of these partners were compromised.

A, is that your experience, too?

Do you share that same view?

And B, is that what you mean by vetting the partners?

What I mean by vetting the partners, and that's not something that we as an NGO is qualified to do, but the state of Israel is doing that.

There are registrations, there are coordination between Israel and the humanitarian organization, and they are checking, they are checking their affiliation, they are checking their operations, they are monitoring, and they are scanning everything that comes in through the crossing.

That's what I mean by vetting.

We are only working with a partner that has the full approval to operate by the IDF, and we have seen this time and time again during the war, way before the GHF or the Corinth crisis.

Yotam Pulitzer, thank you for this conversation and for everything you're doing.

We will provide a link to Israelaid in our show notes.

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you, Dan.

And maybe if I just can end with just one sentence, which I think is the key to all of this.

There has been so much dehumanization on all sides in this crisis.

That's something that I'm witnessing.

And this is something psychological more than anything else.

I have a message to everyone here, everyone involved.

We really need to focus on the most vulnerable, and we can do so much more.

And we're in this for the long term.

Great.

Thank you.

That's our show for today.

If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Inside Call Me Back is where Nadava Yal, Amit Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically happen after the cameras stop rolling.

Inside Call Me Back will come to you every Thursday.

If you don't subscribe, don't worry.

Our Monday episodes will continue to be publicly available.

But to subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes, or you can go to arcmedia.org.

That's ARKmedia.org.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Areti.

Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Mariangelez Burgos.

Our director of operations is Maya Rockoff.

Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.