Harold Thomas, a volunteer at the MCC East Coast Material Resources Center, Ephrata, Pennsylvania, helps fold handmade comforters carefully so they can be packaged for shipping. Thomas is from East Petersburg.
July 26, 2024
By Linda Espenshade
Mennonite Central Committee’s shipment of comforters, hygiene supplies and infant care items is finally on its way to Gaza, after waiting out many delays and surmounting obstacles.
The shipment, which left the MCC East Coast Material Resources Center (MRC) in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, on July 23, has been in the planning stages for several months. It is one of the ways MCC is addressing urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza.
In retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which 251 people were taken hostage and 1,100 were killed, Israel invaded Gaza. Since then, Israel has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians and injured over 85,000. At least 10,000 people are missing under the rubble.
“The devastation in Gaza is unimaginable,” says Seth Malone, MCC representative for Jordan, Palestine and Israel, with his spouse Sarah Funkhouser. “Everyone in Gaza has been affected by the war. The staff of MCC’s partners, like all Palestinians in Gaza, have been forcibly displaced multiple times, are living in terrible conditions and have experienced the murder of multiple family members and relatives.”
For many months, Israel blocked humanitarian organizations from bringing food and other supplies into Gaza. MCC sent funds to its partner organizations operating in Gaza, which were used for cash transfers to vulnerable households and to buy local resources to help displaced people.
But it wasn’t until March 2024 that MCC was able to get a shipment of food for 500 families from Jordan into Gaza. This shipment and future ones are funded by Canadian Foodgrains Bank and included matching funds from the Government of Canada and the Humanitarian Coalition.
MCC partnered with a Jordanian charity that had an existing delivery network to transport food into Gaza. The food underwent many inspections at various Israeli checkpoints until it made it through the Kerem Abu Salem crossing into southern Gaza. MCC’s partner Al-Najd Developmental Forum picked it up there for distribution.
With a way opened, MCC renewed plans to send humanitarian assistance to Gaza from the U.S. Volunteers in Ephrata and across the U.S. donated and packed 2,641 comforters, 2,400 individual hygiene kits, 690 infant care kits and 1,008 relief kits, which are 5-gallon buckets full of towels, soap and other hygiene supplies for a family.
Rudi Niessen, warehouse manager at the MCC East Coast Material Resources Center (MRC) in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, loads a container of relief supplies destined for Gaza.
Rudi Niessen, warehouse manager in Ephrata who is responsible for making sure all the supplies are packaged according to the shipping requirements, had pallets of kits and comforters ready to load in early May.
However, to comply with Israel’s requirements for humanitarian aid entering Gaza, Niessen had to repack the comforters and kits onto pallets in shorter-than-normal stacks. Between 2023 and 2024, MCC sent 43 shipments to nine countries from Ephrata. All of them had been of the same height requirements — but not this one.
Malone said the unusual height requirement is imposed so that the pallets can fit through the scanners Israel uses at its various checkpoints between Jordan and Gaza.
“This means calculating, measuring, go back and measure again,” says Niessen. “And then thinking in my head, how’s it gonna fit in the container?” By the time the shipping container came, he had a plan.
Despite the complication, Niessen says he wasn’t stressed.
“I enjoy loading a container. That satisfies me, that somebody will receive a relief kit or a dignity kit that doesn’t have (these supplies) or had to leave everything behind. And so, for me it is a joy to load a container.”
But loading the Gaza shipment would have to wait.
With Israel’s invasion of the southern city of Rafah in early May, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, who had taken shelter there, were forced to flee from the bombing once again. The chaos of the invasion led to the collapse of the existing aid delivery and distribution mechanisms, closing available routes into Gaza for most humanitarian organizations, including MCC.
MCC continues to send funds to its partners for emergency cash transfers and to purchase food in Gaza because it is the only secure way to help Palestinians in Gaza survive. Some food is getting into Gaza through commercial companies that use armed guards to prevent looting, says Malone, but the logistical cost of these shipments makes food very expensive.
“Relying on commercial vendors for overpriced food is inefficient as there is a backlog of already paid for humanitarian aid just waiting to cross into Gaza,” Malone says. Most humanitarian groups are unwilling to pay armed guards under the principle of “do no harm,” and Israel is failing to provide safe passage for humanitarian aid as required by international humanitarian law.
“Food, tents, hygiene materials, water cleaning tablets, medical supplies and all manner of lifesaving goods are within literal eyesight of the people in Gaza,” Malone says, “but humanitarian actors, including MCC, are being obstructed from delivering them.”
And so the shipment of humanitarian assistance waited.
On July 15, Malone sent word that a northern route into Gaza was opening and that MCC’s comforters and kits should be sent. On July 23, Niesen loaded the supplies into the shipping container. Volunteers and staff gathered to bless the shipment.
Niessen says, “I just pray and hope … that there are no complications at the other end, and people that are designated for these gifts receive them.”
The shipment still has a long journey ahead, as it will take several months to arrive in Jordan and then more time until it arrives in Gaza, probably in the winter, Malone estimates.
He says he prays that the comforters will bring warmth to families living in tents and bombed out buildings, that parents will have basic clothing for their babies and that hygiene and relief kits will provide some measure of support for families who have lost everything.
“All of MCC’s partners here in Palestine and Israel are begging for the world to put an end to this war,” Malone says. “They are asking people of conscience to stand up and take action. There must be a ceasefire; the world must stop giving weapons to Israel; and the prisoners and hostages need to be released.”
Canadians can write to their government leaders about Gaza at mcc.org/peacetoolkit.
