The Race to Deliver Aid to Gaza

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at international efforts to deliver aid to Gaza, Russia’s nuclear threats, and South Korea’s doctors’ strike.

The Push to Aid Gaza

As global outrage grows over the dire humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip, aid agencies are racing to access different land and maritime routes that will allow much-needed aid to reach the besieged territory.

An estimated 576,000 Gazans—or a quarter of Gaza’s entire population—are on the verge of famine as aid agencies struggle to deliver food and medical supplies to the region, according to the United Nations. Humanitarian officials have criticized Israel for restricting the flow of aid into Gaza, which Israeli officials deny doing.

Facing mounting international pressure, Israel on Tuesday allowed six aid trucks from the U.N. World Food Program to transit a new land route via an Israeli military road to supply food to 25,000 people in Gaza City, marking the agency’s first successful aid shipment to northern Gaza in around three weeks. “We are hoping to scale up, we need access to be regular and consistent especially with people in northern Gaza on the brink of famine,” Shaza Moghraby, the WFP spokesperson, told Reuters. “We need entry points directly to the north.”

That delivery comes as a ship carrying 200 tons of food departed for Gaza on Tuesday, in the first major test of a new maritime corridor that could help bring some temporary humanitarian relief to war-weary Gazans. It also comes as the U.S. military and Jordanian forces have carried out three separate airdrops of humanitarian aid into the territory in recent weeks, some of which reportedly killed civilians due to faulty deployments.

U.N. officials say that Israel’s inspection process is obstructing much-needed aid from reaching Gazans. According to Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Israel earlier this week rejected an aid truck because it carried children’s medical kits that included scissors, which Israel has deemed to be a prohibited “dual use” item. Israeli officials have accused him of lying and said they were not informed that had happened. UNRWA is the primary U.N. agency that provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza; however, the United States and more than a dozen other countries suspended funding to the organization in January after Israel accused 12 of its over 13,000 employees of participating in the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

On Tuesday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell accused Israel of using starvation as a “war arm.” The humanitarian crisis is “manmade and when we look for alternative ways of providing support by sea, by air, we have to remind [ourselves] that we have to do it because the natural way of providing support through roads is being…artificially closed,” he said.

And even as more aid trickles in, world leaders and humanitarian organizations warn that the supply is insufficient given the scale of suffering in Gaza. “The truth is, aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere nearly enough now. It’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line,” U.S. President Joe Biden said this month. “We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several.”

Today’s Most Read

• How Israel Mastered Information Warfare in Gaza by Alessandro Accorsi
• The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia’s Information War by Ian Garner
• The Hidden Dangers in China’s GDP Numbers by Amit Kumar

What We’re Following 

Putin’s nuclear warnings. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Wednesday that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons if its “sovereignty and independence” come under attack, echoing previous threats to wield the weapons against NATO countries that send troops to Ukraine. But the Russian leader also said that he didn’t think Washington and Moscow were “rushing head-on” toward a nuclear war.

Putin’s warnings come as the Biden administration announced a $300 million military aid package to Ukraine on Tuesday while another $60 billion of support for Kyiv remains stuck in Congress. “Today’s announcement provides a short-term stop gap, but it is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs,” the administration said. “Without supplemental funding, DoD will remain hard-pressed to meet Ukraine’s capability requirements at a time when Russia is pressing its attacks against Ukrainian forces and cities.”

TikTok crackdown. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that would ban the social media app TikTok in the United States if the platform is not sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The bill, which passed with a vote of 352-65, is the latest reflection of how national security concerns related to technology have become a flashpoint in U.S.-China relations.

Having advanced from the House, the bill will now head to the Senate. And TikTok may face a difficult path forward, FP’s James Palmer wrote in this week’s China Brief newsletter. “Speaking with U.S. China policy staffers in the last week, the consensus was that TikTok was doomed in the United States,” he wrote.

South Korea’s striking doctors. South Korea has moved to penalize thousands of striking doctors by beginning proceedings to suspend their medical licenses, the latest development in a weeks-long struggle that has thrown South Korea’s medical system into turmoil.

Across South Korea, some 12,000 doctors have been striking over government plans to admit 2,000 more students to medical school beginning in 2025, which Seoul says would help resolve staffing shortages. The striking doctors argue that the proposal would not help the issue—which they say is limited to specific specialties—and that the government must address poor pay and working conditions.

Odds and Ends

A flight in China was unexpectedly delayed for hours last Wednesday not because of inclement weather or malfunctioning parts, but because a passenger tossed several coins into the plane’s engine—presumably because they believed it would bring good luck. China Southern Airlines, the flight’s carrier, was not pleased. “Throwing coins at the plane pose[s] a threat to aviation safety and will result in different levels of punishment,” it said in a social media post that did not explicitly name the incident.