AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Earlier this week, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that Gaza is seeing, quote, "a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times." A U.N. official says a third of Palestinians in Gaza are going without food for days at a time and about 100,000 women and children are suffering severe acute malnutrition because of the blockade by Israel.
Ciaran Donnelly is a senior vice president at the International Rescue Committee. He still has staff on the ground in Gaza, and we were hoping to speak with one of those aid workers earlier today, but just as our conversation was set to begin, he had to flee to safety because of Israeli airstrikes. So thank you so much for stepping in to speak with us.
CIARAN DONNELLY: Thank you.
CHANG: I want to first ask about your colleagues on the ground because I know the IRC is one of the very few organizations still in position in Gaza to try to keep providing aid. What are you hearing personally from your colleagues?
DONNELLY: We're deeply worried, as you can imagine, about our colleagues on the ground, most of whom are Palestinian colleagues. They're from Gaza, working in and among their communities. For many months now, we've been hearing about their concerns for their safety and the safety of their families, but in recent weeks, we've also been hearing about their very real concerns of being able to provide sufficient food for themselves and for their families - particularly elderly parents and children that they're taking care of.
They're telling us that because people know they work for an international humanitarian organization, neighbors and community members are coming to them looking for food, which they're not able to provide. They're struggling to be able to feed themselves, some reporting going as many as four days without having anything to eat, and even then only being able to find a watery lentil stew to be able to sustain themselves. We're incredibly worried about their welfare.
CHANG: Can you talk about the humanitarian infrastructure that usually exists in even terrible situations like this? Like, you have worked to relieve humanitarian crises around the world. What makes Gaza different to you?
DONNELLY: One of the hallmarks of the humanitarian world over the last decade or more is that we've successfully averted famines in the kinds of conditions that we're seeing in Gaza in many countries around the world - in places like Somalia and Yemen and South Sudan. People have suffered enormously, but not at the levels they might have, because of humanitarian intervention.
We're just not seeing that in Gaza today, and that's principally because, although the infrastructure for the humanitarian response needed exists on the ground through U.N. agencies and humanitarian NGOs like the IRC, we just simply aren't able to get the supplies in to be able to resource our programs - whether that's for food distributions or specialized treatment for those who are malnourished, or indeed treatment for things like diarrhea and communicable diseases, which can prove lethal, especially for young children, whose bodies are already weakened by hunger and malnutrition.
CHANG: Well, Israel has pinned blame on Hamas. It has maintained that Hamas has been systematically stealing humanitarian supplies, and that has been their argument for supporting an armed private aid operation. Have your colleagues seen any evidence whatsoever of a concerted effort by Hamas to loot or steal supplies?
DONNELLY: I think it's first important to underscore that modern humanitarian organizations like the IRC, like our peers, work in conflict zones around the world, funded by almost every major international government donor. And in order to meet their standards and sustain that funding, we have to implement rigorous safeguards to ensure that our aid, our assistance, doesn't benefit any party to the conflict in a country in which we're working. And we've applied those standards rigorously in Gaza, as we do everywhere else. Our teams on the ground - we've had staff on the ground since December 2007 - have not seen, reported, any evidence of systematic diversion of aid on the ground.
CHANG: Well, as we keep hearing about how incredibly dire the situation is in Gaza, I imagine it's quite easy to resign to a feeling of hopelessness or helplessness right now, but you and your colleagues continue to work under these conditions. What do you think needs to happen to meaningfully relieve the suffering that your staff is seeing every single day?
DONNELLY: What's needed to meaningfully change the conditions under which they're operating is really quite simple and tragically simple. We need to open up the borders so that supplies and personnel are able to surge in. We need to create safe conditions on the ground. We need a halt to fighting, which can create the preconditions for a scale-up in aid and specialized services but also creates preconditions for releasing hostages and for creating dialogue, ultimately, to find a way out of this horrific situation that has beleaguered the population of Gaza for almost two years now.
CHANG: Ciaran Donnelly is a senior vice president at the International Rescue Committee. Thank you very much for giving us your time today.
DONNELLY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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