United Nations Radio

Meanhwhile, with the attacks on Gaza continuing for a tenth day, there are growing fears that the already difficult living conditions of the people there will worsen.

Assisting the Gazans

As you heard in the news, the World Food Programme, which before the crisis was feeding more than a quarter million needy Gazans, is stepping up its assistance to families in northern Gaza that have not previously received WFP assistance. Donn Bobb spoke to the WFP's Robin Lodge to find out just how bad the situation is and what the agency is doing to get food to the people of Gaza.

LODGE: Well, I'd certainly say there's a humanitarian crisis and I'd go further and say there's a specific food crisis. People do not have access to food, people are going hungry, people cannot get out of their homes. Those that do venture out of their homes find absolutely nothing in the market, and in addition the most vulnerable people are not receiving the food distributions they would normally receive because of the security situation. So in all I would say there's a crisis in Gaza right now.

DONN: What is the WFP doing to help and alleviate this crisis?

LODGE: We are doing our best to find ways of reaching these people. One of the things we're doing is delivering flour to bakeries so the bakeries can actually provide baked bread to people who don't have any power, who cannot actually bake their own bread. ... There again, we still have the problem of actually getting the flour from the bakeries to the people in need but we're doing our best to find ways of doing this. The other thing we're doing is we have a lot of our food in government warehouses where they no longer have access. We are doing our best to retrieve some of that food and actually start distributing it to people directly from trucks. We can't do that with some of the food but we can at least do that with flour and vegetable oil. We have delivered canned meat and high energy biscuits to 13 Gaza hospitals. We are always looking for ways we can actually get food to people and people to food. At present we don't have a big problem with stocks of food. Our own stocks amount to some 3,700 tons enough for our caseload of 265,000 people for about 2 months. But that of course is not really enough for the needs of the population and also we do not have access to quite a lot of it because of the security situation. But we're trying to gain access, and we're trying to find ways of moving the food, and we are succeeding in a small way. We have managed to distribute 50,000 tons of food since the 29th of December but we need to do far more.

Donn: How much is the impact is the security situation, the destruction of the infrastructure to take food to the people?

LODGE: The destruction of infrastructure is something that affects other agencies more than us, if you're talking about fuel, power, water and sanitation. With us, it's a much more straight forward business of actually getting food to distribution points. So the collapse of infrastructure, in as much as you're talking about services, does not affect us so much. But security does affect us because it's actually getting people on the ground, people who can move the food, our cooperating partners cannot get their staff out on the street to do this, we cannot get people working at distribution centers and we cannot physically move food within Gaza without immense difficulty. So that is our major problem.

PRESENTER: Robin Lodge with WFP in Jerusalem.

(duration:  3'24")