One week ago, the media was
filled with
warnings on how Israel's ban of UNRWA activities inside Israel would curtail aid to Gaza.
Since then, I cannot find a single news story that says that aid to Gaza has been affected one bit.
In fact, the number of stories about aid to Gaza have dropped to nearly nothing. One exception was from AP on Monday which
did not mention UNRWA at all:
Two weeks after the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel took effect, aid is flooding into the Gaza Strip, bringing relief to a territory suffering from hunger, mass displacement and devastation following 15 months of war.
Israel estimates that at least 4,200 trucks have entered each week since the ceasefire took hold.
The main U.N. food agency, the World Food Program, said it dispersed more food to Palestinians in Gaza during the first four days of the ceasefire than it did, on average, during any month of the war. Over 32,000 metric tons of aid have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, the agency said last week.
Aid is now entering through two crossings in the north and one in the south. Aid agencies said they are opening bakeries and handing out high-energy biscuits, and Hamas police have returned to the streets to help restore order.
The article goes on to describe what WFP, UNICEF and UNMAS (explosive removal) are doing in Gaza - but nothing about UNRWA.
Somehow, all this is happening without UNRWA being open for business in Israel.
Since the news media lost interest in UNRWA, it is more difficult to understand exactly what Israel's ban encompasses. From what I can tell, it only closed down the UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem. Clinics and schools in the West Bank are operating normally. Presumably the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza are also still working since they are not dependent on working directly with Israel.
At least some UNRWA trucks have entered Gaza since the ban.
You can be sure that if there was a significant impact on aid to Gaza, the news media would be all over it.
Sometimes, the only way to understand the news is to see what isn't being reported. From everything we see, thousands of trucks filled with aid can enter Gaza and be distributed without UNRWA being a critical component.
UNRWA isn't nearly as important as the "experts" have said. Because the media is very reluctant to report on stories that disprove their confident predictions, the story simply disappears.