UN food programme chief denies claims Hamas stealing from Gaza aid trucks

Cindy McCain, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), refuted on Sunday allegations that Hamas is stealing food aid going into Gaza, and took issue with the use of the term "looting" to describe civilians who effectively steal what they can. 

"Listen, people are desperate, and they see a World Food Programme truck coming in, and they run for it. This doesn't have anything to do with Hamas or any kind of organised crime or anything," McCain told the US network CBS.

"[It's] simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death." 

Cindy is the widow of a longtime pro-war Republican voice in US politics, Senator John McCain, who ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race. He died in 2018. 

In 2021, after having voted for Joe Biden as president, Cindy was appointed the US ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Two years later, she became the executive director of the WFP just months before the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, and the subsequent Israeli war and siege of the strip at the end of that year. 

Speaking to CBS's Face The Nation programme on Sunday, she urged world leaders to pressure Israel to open up border crossings into Gaza and allow aid deliveries to resume. 

"We will continue to go in with food and the kinds of supplies we need to help the bakeries operate and make sure that we can continue to do that, and hopefully be able to do more of it," she said. "But again, we can't do this unless the world community puts pressure on this. We can't be allowed to sit back and watch these people starve to death with no outside diplomatic influence to help us."

Israel sealed off Gaza once again in early March and refused to move on to the second phase of a ceasefire agreement. The UN and humanitarian organisations around the world have since said there is a famine underway in the enclave. 

Even before the 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza, the strip needed some 500 trucks of aid a day to survive, as it has been under an Israeli military blockade since 2007. 

"These poor souls are really, really, really desperate," Cindy told CBS. "Having been in a food riot myself some years ago, I understand the desperation."

On Monday, the Reuters news agency, citing its own sources in Gaza, reported that Hamas-led groups executed four people for stealing from the few aid trucks that began trickling into the strip. 

The four had allegedly been involved in an incident last week when six local security officials were killed by an Israeli air strike as they were working to prevent gangs from hijacking aid trucks, Reuters said. 

The few trucks that have made it into Gaza appear to have been let in under the banner of the scandal-plagued Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli initiative designed to bypass the UN's infrastructure for aid delivery and distribution in the strip. 

The organisation plans to use US private contractors to administer food distribution at designated Israeli-controlled sites in Gaza. 

GHF's CEO, a former US Marine, resigned on Sunday, saying it was "clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon".

Cindy told CBS that the trucks that have gone in this past week are a "dribble" and "a drop in the bucket".

"Right now, we have 500,000 people inside of Gaza that are extremely food insecure, and could be on the verge of famine if we don't help bring them back from that," she said.