Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid organization based in Portland, has had a small staff based in Gaza for years. For the last month, they have been checking in with staff members about the conditions on the ground. The organization is calling for a humanitarian cease-fire to provide aid to Gaza. Arnaud Quemin, the Middle East regional director for Mercy Corps, joins us to talk about what he’s hearing from staff, and what is needed for an effective humanitarian response in Gaza.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Mercy Corps, the humanitarian aid organization based in Portland has had a small staff in Palestine for years. For the last month, they’ve been checking in with their aid workers about conditions on the ground. Earlier this week, Mercy Corps joined a number of UN agencies, the World Health Organization, the World Food Program and other aid groups in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire to provide aid to residents in Gaza. Arnaud Quemin is the Middle East regional director for Mercy Corps. He joins us with more. It’s good to have you on the show.
Arnaud Quemin: Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with the recent past, the work that Mercy Corps has done in Gaza pre-October 6th. Can you give us a sense for what it’s entailed?
Quemin: Sure. Actually, that’s a pleasure to go back to that period. That seems to be very, very far at this point. So we had different activities, one of course was still very humanitarian in nature, because as a result of the blockade, a lot of people had a lot of trouble to find employment, so just access to basic services. So we were distributing humanitarian aid to, I don’t remember how many 1,000 people there. But we’re also working with the local farmers in the south to support the production of agricultural products. So, for instance, helping them with setting up irrigation systems and greenhouses. And then we had, on the other side, a very interesting program with the local young tech community. It was a vibrant scene of startups trying to harness the possibilities offered by the internet and new technologies to find gigs online and increase their chances to work in a place that was pretty challenged economically.
Miller: So young tech savvy Gazans could be in Gaza, but they could be in a sense working anywhere in the world?
Quemin: Exactly. Yes. And because they were quite brilliant for the most part, they were really able to market their skills on various platforms. We are helping them gain access to work as a content providers for, I don’t remember, I think there was one from Australia, I was checking in with some of them and another one was working with the Gulf countries. So yes, that was the other program we were having.
Miller: You mentioned the blockade. Was access a challenge in the past in terms of getting supplies in, or people in or out of Gaza?
Quemin: Yes, that was definitely… It was not, was not sealed as it is now, but it was a very challenged place, a lot of technologies and equipment were forbidden. We could not import them. We were not working through providing things in, we were relying on local procurements whenever we had to distribute things. But even for people to go in and out was a whole process.
Miller: You mentioned in response to my first question about what your operations were like before October 6th, that you were happy to do that because it seems like a very long time ago. What did go through your mind on that terrible day of terrorist attacks in Israel?
Quemin: Oh, I mean, at first, I was not really sure about the magnitude of the crisis we are looking at. And so it took like a whole day of checking in and understanding the news I was reading to really realize that we are really moving into a completely different situation. And yeah, it took maybe a couple of hours to really confirm that the reports we are getting were reliable and that meant that a lot of things were not going to be the same after that.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what the scale of your operations in Gaza had been?
Quemin: Yeah, I mean, I guess the best way of quantifying that would be we have, and we still have, 70 staff in Gaza, working on these different programs, at that time reaching, I don’t know, 50,000 people or 60,000 people on an annual basis.
Miller: You said, so that you had 70 staff in Gaza before, and are they all still in Gaza?
Quemin: Yes, they are still in Gaza. And as a team, we are extremely…like the first part of this past month has been spent largely around checking on them and coordinating with those who could support the others to help, because they all were displaced or like the vast majority were displaced and most of them were displaced like many times over the past month. So now we have a well established protocol to check in every day, see who is where and in what situation. Unfortunately, these past 10 days, there was one that we could not reestablish contact with in the very north of the Gaza Strip. So it’s an area that has no more fuel, no more infrastructure. So we are very worried, we hope that it is just a problem with the communication rather than her being injured or worse.
Miller: At this point, are the Mercy Corps workers who are Gazans themselves, are they doing work for Mercy Corps? Are they continuing their work or are they just surviving?
Quemin: Well, it really depends, because the situation is very difficult for them as it is for everybody else in Gaza, of course. I guess the first few weeks were really spent for most of them to take care of their families, re-establish a place where they could sleep in the south. After this initial phase, of course, some remain very challenged and it’s very difficult for them to do anything else but just attend to their needs and the needs of their children and their parents.
But there is a small core group which first was really instrumental, those people are real heroes. They were really instrumental in helping the others and we are coordinating with them, like if we needed to pay a vendor who would provide things and they would be in charge of finding ways to get these goods to our team, like one who needed a mattress here or food there, providing water. I mean, now it’s almost becoming impossible. But this small group was also ready to like expand because there were more and more people who are like, OK, now, what can we do, because they are humanitarians to the core. And so we were able to procure some food last week and distribute them to extremely vulnerable people who are so physically impacted that they could not go and queue for four hours to get a bit of bread. So we were able to procure that and distribute this to these very vulnerable people, thanks to this team and a local partner we have.
Miller: All of it within Gaza?
Quemin: Yes. And unfortunately, this was the last time we could do that because now the supplies are so depleted that we could not even do this redistribution within Gaza because now everybody is basically scrambling for something to eat.
Miller: What supplies are most needed right now, broadly?
Quemin: I mean everything is very needed and those that are the most needed for people’s survival. So water, food and medical supplies, and fuel, because so many things are depending on electricity and there’s no electricity in Gaza. So for instance, the desalinization plants cannot work because there is no power, or hospitals cannot operate because they don’t have power or they operate in extremely difficult situations. People cannot come and find goods very far from where they live because they don’t have cars. For the luckiest of them, they use donkey carts.
So yes, food, water, medical supplies and fuel would be the obvious things that we would get in. And of course, we are prepositioning some goods, because the winter is getting worse and when people are displaced, they don’t really have the leisure of taking things with them or a lot of things. So, a lot of people are now sheltering in houses that are not heated and they need blankets and basic kits to establish themselves. So we are prepositioning these, on the Egyptian side, for whenever we can cross.
Miller: Getting supplies in would obviously only be the beginning. What would it take to get them to the people who need them the most?
Quemin: I mean, as you might tell, that’s the thing - we know how to do best, assessing the level of vulnerability. We have plenty of systems to score and it’s in a context, like I was just on a call with my team an hour ago and we were talking about that. In some areas, you will probably need to do some form of large distributions because the level of need is staggering. And you, of course, we will go straight to the people who are the most at risk. But I think you could imagine that the vast majority of people in Gaza today are vulnerable.
Miller: There have been many reports over the years of Hamas using hospital tunnels or ambulances either as command and control centers or for transporting militants or weapons. There have also been many reports over the last month of Israel hitting health care facilities or locations nearby, they say for the former reason. But what have these meant just in terms of humanitarian realities in combination for everyday Gazans who need medical care?
Quemin: Well, we are not in the business of providing medical care. So I don’t have a firsthand experience of that, but we’ve been operating in Gaza for many years now. And we had to be very clear around our principles and our red lines and of course, we had at times to negotiate very hard to say we are not going to budge because if we were, we would not be able to deliver a proper humanitarian response, and that would jeopardize not only our work in Gaza, but anywhere, because if you are not a principled humanitarian actor, your credibility in other contexts will also be at stake. And some of those moments were very tough, but ultimately, we were able to get what we needed to continue operating in that fashion.
Miller: There have been some rocket attacks back and forth between Israel and Lebanon. But the nightmare scenario of a much larger war, one involving Iranian backed forces in Lebanon has not happened. What are you paying attention to in the region these days from a humanitarian perspective?
Quemin: So, from a human perspective, well of course we are trying to understand the dynamics at play. But we have very little say in how those things unfold. So what we are looking at are signs of a form of escalation that will not be controlled, if you see what I mean - and that would snowball into a different situation. But, our concern is mostly around what would that mean in terms of humanitarian needs and how can we be prepared to respond in that scenario? And so you were mentioning Lebanon, we’ve been responding in the south of Lebanon and we also have put in place contingency planning in case things were to become much worse. But yes, at the moment we are mostly working to a response that is starting to become I would say over a certain size, we have more than 30,000 people displaced from the south of Lebanon. And many of them were left in the southern part without a lot of support, so we were able to distribute goods and a bit of food also last week.
Miller: You’ve worked in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, a number of other countries. So it’s not like you’re not used to the challenges of trying to provide humanitarian aid during very complicated and politically complicated times. But have you ever dealt with a situation quite like this with so much global attention?
Quemin: The short answer is no and it’s very shocking. And at the same time, I would say that the political nature of the story is a feature of the situation. But for me, what is staggering is the nature of the situation in Gaza these days, I haven’t seen that in an extremely long time, like this level of a humanitarian crisis, unraveling without any sense of end. At this moment, we don’t have a clear path towards a proper scaled up response in Gaza. There are signs that the negotiations are trying to get to a breakthrough. But what is happening is something that is getting worse every hour. It’s interesting because we’ve talked about how dire a situation would be under a siege tactic. And we spoke about that from the first day, except that we are now much farther down that path. And the impact of the siege is becoming exponentially bad on people. And the fact that we’ve been speaking about that from the beginning tends to insulate ourselves from the fact that it’s actually reaching new levels of human suffering.
I don’t know how I can convey the humanity behind the story, and maybe I can just share the fact that we were also very closely in touch with our team with those who were able to use communication lines with us. And what they describe is absolutely heartbreaking and unheard of. So I guess I’m a seasoned humanitarian [but] at this point, I cannot say I’ve heard of anything like that before.
Miller: Arnaud Quemin, thanks very much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time.
Quemin: Pleasure, thanks.
Miller: Arnaud Quemin is the Middle East regional director for the Portland-based Mercy Corps.
Just now, while we were talking, we got an email from a Mercy Corps representative. It had a recent voice memo from one of their humanitarian workers in Gaza. This is what she said.
[Recording from humanitarian worker in Gaza]: “I think what’s been really hard, other than all of this, is waking up every day and checking on my colleagues and my friends and trying to see who survived the night. And it’s really hard. It really is, because every day, every day I wake up at sunrise, because that’s when I know we made it for one more day, and then try to check on my messages, text my friends, see who made it. And I can’t tell you how it’s been really hard, repetitive, very heartbreaking that this has been going for more than a month without a ceasefire.”
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