For months, international aid agencies and governments around the world, including close allies of Israel, have accused the Jewish state of not doing enough to ensure Palestinian civilians in Gaza are receiving basic food supplies and other crucial aid. There have been predictions and projections that the dire situation on the ground is already causing severe malnutrition, which could soon become an all-out famine across the Strip.

But since the early days of the war with Hamas, Israel has insisted that it is doing everything it can – given the constraints of the battlefield – to facilitate the entry of aid sent by multiple countries and international groups into the Palestinian enclave.

In recent weeks, COGAT, the Israeli army unit responsible for coordinating civilian matters with the Palestinians, has stated that most of the land crossings into Gaza are open, hundreds of trucks filled with aid and commercial goods enter every day, along with airdrops by the Jordanian and Egyptian militaries and a floating pier – opened recently by the U.S. Central Command – to receive aid ships arriving from Cyprus.

COGAT says that the main barrier preventing aid from reaching Palestinian civilians is the poor distribution system and scant manpower of the United Nations and other aid agencies working inside Gaza, as well as cynical efforts by the Iranian-backed terror groups – Hamas and others – to thwart humanitarian efforts and divert the aid to their own pockets.

It’s a paradigmatic debate with each side claiming it is the responsibility of the other to ensure that aid reaches those who most need it. Yet, after nearly eight months of war, the unresolved matter continues to cause hardships for Gazans and has opened Israel, particularly its leaders, to accusations of using starvation as a weapon of war and genocide.

“In terms of the concept of a right to food, apart from being a fundamental human need, one of the development goals that the United Nation holds and one that we also believe in is having a world free from hunger,” Aron Troen, a professor of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Jewish Insider.

Troen is one of several top Israeli academics and public health officials who carried out a recent study into the quality and quantity of food that has entered Gaza in recent months that found that the aid currently going inside does, at least numerically, meet international nutritional standards.

Based on data provided by COGAT, the study found that the quantity and nutritional composition of the food that was delivered between January and April this year even exceeded the Sphere standards, an internationally recognized benchmark for humanitarian response, and that it should have adequately provided for the territory’s entire population of around 2.4 million.

“The question of what happens with food in times of war is not my expertise – that is a legal question that relates to the conduct of the war and of what is and isn’t reasonable or expected or possible during a war,” Troen continued. “However, there is an international convention and legal obligation of combatants to not deliberately starve or use food as a weapon – each side has an obligation to ensure that, to the best extent possible, aid is transferred and food is not denied so that the non-combat civilian population isn’t harmed.”

The study looked at all food aid shipments that entered Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Nitzana land crossings, as well as the daily airdrops. It categorized and quantified each food item, and the nutrient compositions were assessed based on existing food composition databases. The researchers then calculated the total energy (kcal), protein (grams), fat (grams), and iron (mg) content of all shipments and divided the total by the estimated population size reported by the Gaza Central Bureau of Statistics. The daily per capita supply was then compared to Sphere standards.

Troen told JI that the research was prompted by inaccuracies in the data being published by U.N. aid agencies and other international bodies, such as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Organization, that monitor and analyze food security around the world.

“The reports were based on flawed and limited data,” he said, adding, “the predictions of famine were based on worst-case scenarios.”

Despite questionable data and methods, Troen noted that the declarations were quickly repeated by the media, and “used by those hostile Israel to make claims of deliberate starvation, genocide and war crimes.”

Last month, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said he would seek arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.”

“There is a large gap between the harms of war and the claim that Israelis are deliberately starving Palestinians,” Troen said, cautioning, however, that there is undoubtedly suffering in Gaza. He also highlighted that the study did not look at what happened to the aid after it entered the enclave or how it was distributed.

Dorit Nitzan, a professor at the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva who has served as the World Health Organization’s coordinator of health and emergencies, oversaw the study together with Troen.

She said that the “quantity and quality of food delivered by the international donors through Israel to Gaza has steadily improved since January and the study’s findings suggest that the current food supply contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs.”

However, Nitzan added, “further studies are needed to investigate food distribution and population access to humanitarian aid.”

In early May, Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme, one of the U.N. agencies currently working inside the Gaza Strip, told NBC News that there is already a full-blown famine in the northern part of Palestinian territory. Her statements were based on the IPC’s estimates, a spokesperson for the WFP said, referring JI to the IPC for further clarification. A spokesperson for the IPC said that its current report, which is based on figures between October and December, would be updated in the coming weeks to reflect the current situation on the ground.

Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the U.S.-based Refugees International, told JI that assessing aid deliveries based on caloric volumes was at best “a math exercise” and not really “an indication of the actual household level consumption by people in Gaza.”

“The research paper does not really alter the assessment of severe food insecurity across Gaza and famine conditions in some of the worst hit areas,” he said, noting also that the study covered the period in the first quarter of this year and not the last three months of 2023.

“Almost no food was entering Gaza during the early months of the war,” Konyndyk said. “The Oct-Dec period was when major food deficits first emerged, and that is what prompted the original famine warnings.”

While the amount of aid entering might have increased, he said that distribution and safe aid access still “remain the biggest challenges in terms of combating famine.” He also said that Israeli claims that Hamas was interfering with aid operations were inaccurate.

“Most of the last-mile distribution challenges relate to IDF conduct and obstacles from the Israeli government,” Konyndyk said.  

Eri Kaneko, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), also highlighted distribution problems she said were caused primarily by the Israeli military.

“Every third humanitarian mission coordinated with the Israeli authorities in southern Gaza in recent weeks was either impeded following an initial approval or denied access altogether,” she said in a statement.

“Humanitarian workers and volunteers spare no effort, often risking their lives, to support civilians in Gaza amid active hostilities,” Kaneko continued. “Mounting an effective humanitarian operation in a war zone requires security assurances for aid workers and unimpeded passage to distribute assistance at scale.”

She said that OCHA has stressed to Israel that its “responsibility does not end when supplies are dropped off at the border – as that alone does not guarantee aid workers’ access to safely pick them up, let alone distribute them to those in need inside Gaza.”

However, Col. Elad Goren, who heads the civil department of COGAT, told JI that it was the responsibility of U.N. agencies and other international humanitarian organizations to ensure that aid reached the civilian population.

“From our side, everything is open,” he said. “If they want to bring in 700 trucks a day then we can facilitate it, there is no problem.”

Goren said that one of the biggest problems was the U.N.’s poor distribution system and its lack of manpower.

“In order to understand why they have a distribution challenge you first have to look at their trucks,” he said. “There is a limited number of trucks inside Gaza and we have asked the U.N. and other agencies to purchase more trucks and bring them into Gaza. Unfortunately, we are eight months into this war and only around 15 new trucks have entered Gaza.”

“For such a large logistical operation, I was hoping that we would see at least 150 new trucks going in,” Goren continued. “We also have a lot of criticisms of the international organizations because they do not have enough manpower.”

“If we compare their work here to other places around the world, such as Yemen, Iraq or even Ukraine, they brought in thousands of people from international organizations to take part in the humanitarian effort,” he said. “Here we are only seeing around 60 people and that is a very low number.”

“Of course, Gaza is a war zone, it’s small, it’s highly populated and it is very crowded,” Goren added. “Also, Hamas is fully embedded with the civilian population, and they are sabotaging humanitarian efforts so they can criticize Israel and force us to end this war.”