With new border policies, humanitarian aid cargo may finally be allowed into Gaza. Photo: Peter Casier (flickr)

Derar Mohamed, our blogger from Gaza, writes on the economic and social issues facing the Middle East today.

Gaza is a 139-square-mile area of land, according to the CIA World Factbook, with a population density reaching one of the highest in the world—12,000 people per square mile. This big society's needs are growing constantly while all six Israeli borders and the seventh Egyptian border that link it to life have remained closed. However, toward the end of last May, the Egyptian authorities decided to re-open the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to partially ease the blockade that Israel has imposed on Gaza since 2006.

From an economic, social, and political point of view, the opening of the border will improve access to many essential needs for Gazan people. Gazans, including scholarship holders seeking higher education, contractors with jobs outside of Gaza and patients looking for better treatment options, would finally be able to fulfill their right of traveling freely to the outside world without feeling trapped just because of where they live.

Second, the opening would make it easier to bring the necessary raw construction materials that would allow for reconstruction from some serious understructure and infrastructure damages after the Israeli assault in 2009.

Finally, as the strip is mostly dependent on the “often-closed” Israeli borders to bring in decent goods and aid, Gazans have been forced to depend on smuggling goods through tunnels. This dangerous job has taken the lives of hundreds of Palestinians who suffer from unemployment. The opening of the crossing would partially solve this issue by increasing the amount and safety of commercial exchange being processed through the border between Gaza and Egypt.

Many political reactions followed the re-opening of the border. Nabil al Arabi, former Egyptian interim foreign minister and the new Arab League Secretary-General, has declared that closing the Rafah border under the Mubarak regime was "disgraceful," while Israel has described the re-opening of the border as a "national failure." I can still remember the humiliation I faced along with many other Palestinians on the border; I cannot imagine how giving people parts of their lost dignity and basic human rights back can be considered as a "national failure."

The hours I waited on the Palestinian side of the border cannot be easily wiped away from my memory. I made it through, though tens of ill people, businessmen and students were rejected.

While the border is officially opened again, it has been closed several times, according to a report done by Democracy Now. Egypt claims that there has been some necessary repair work; Palestinians claim that Egypt is being exposed to international pressures to withdraw its decision of re-opening the border.

As the border opens and closes, Palestinians in Gaza are looking forward to seeing and connecting with the outside world; to bring Gaza to the world, and to bring the world to Gaza.

Mercy Corps' Cassandra Nelson.

Despite Israel’s commitment to establishing a humanitarian corridor and daily three-hour ceasefire, delivering humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip has been a challenge. The Mercy Corps team on the ground reports that on the first day of the ceasefire, fewer than 40 trucks were allowed in — compared with nearly 500 trucks per day in spring 2007.

Yesterday a truckload of 7 tons food ($17,000 worth) for 2,000 people made it into Gaza. Mercy Corps staffer Cassandra Nelson shares her account of the transfer below.

Despite many obstacles and bureaucratic procedures presented by the Israeli authorities, Mercy Corps successfully delivered emergency relief food items to Gaza on Thursday.

The organization delivered a truckload of vegetable cooking oil, rice and canned tuna fish in sufficient quantities to feed 2,000 extremely vulnerable people for a week.

Mercy Corps spent the past 11 days working through Israeli red tape and protocols that seemed to change daily to secure the permission to deliver the truck today. The delivery was supposed to be made Wednesday, but at 2 a.m. the Mercy Corps team in Jerusalem received notice from the Israeli Defense Forces that the delivery was being postponed because it contained dates, which were not an essential food item. Today's delivery did not include dates.

The truck was repacked last night without the dates and with an extra three tons of rice. At dawn this morning, the truck and Mercy Corps monitors set out for the Kerem Shalom checkpoint.

The Mercy Corps vehicle joined a line of about 25 trucks waiting at the border. After about an hour long wait, the Israeli customs officials inspected the delivery and paperwork and allowed the truck to proceed into the unloading area for all shipments.

The vehicle was admitted to the unloading compound with several other aid trucks — all from various UN branches. The pallets were unloaded by forklift.

After all the items were removed from the truck and placed on the pavement of the compound, the security check began. Sniffing dogs were released to check the material. Next, a border control worker probed and stabbed every package with a long metal rod to check if anything might be hidden inside.

After the checks were completed, all the Israeli workers and other observers and monitors were told to exit back to the Israel side of the border. Once the compound was empty of all people, the gates on the Israeli side were slammed shut.

Next, the gates on the Gaza side of the compound were opened, allowing the Palestinians to enter the compound and collect the delivery with their trucks. No trucks were allowed to drive from the Israeli side to the Gaza side. Everything was offloaded from the trucks on the Israel side and then reloaded onto different trucks on the Gaza side.

Israeli guards said that at no point in the process are Israelis and Palestinians from the Gaza side allowed to meet each other.

The number deliveries are still far short of what is needed to serve a population that increasingly relies on outside aid to survive. On Wednesday, only 36 humanitarian-aid trucks were allowed to make their deliveries. Compare that to 2007, when an average of 500 trucks entered daily.

The Wall Street Journal reports on Mercy Corps' challenges in sending the delivery of food aid in this video.

Given the frequently gloomy headlines regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, many may not be surprised to hear of the latest violence in the region. But NPR reports the current conflict is the heaviest fighting the Gaza Strip has seen since the 1967 Six Day War — and some of the hardest hit seem to be Palestinian civilians.

Following the start of an Israeli ground invasion, the latest reports from the Washington Post indicate that 550 Palestinians have been killed and 2,500 injured — and according to Palestinian health officials, between 24 and 30 percent of those are women and children. Currently the Israeli government has closed Gaza's borders to everything except a small trickle of humanitarian aid, insufficient to meet the needs on the ground.

Mercy Corps is calling for immediate humanitarian access to Gaza to deliver food and other essential supplies. You can sign the petition by clicking here. This petition urges the U.S. government to push for aid to be allowed in now.

You can also help get critical humanitarian items needed once the border is open by donating to Mercy Corps' Gaza Crisis Fund. Mercy Corps has a four-ton shipment of food that's scheduled to enter Gaza tomorrow, and they're deploying additional aid workers to Jerusalem and Egypt to prepare to do more. Check out how Gazan youth involved with Mercy Corps are handling the crisis and keep up-to-date on Mercy Corps' response to the crisis.