Michelle Nunn: The Challenges of Gaza’s Humanitarian Crisis

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This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on August 20, 2024. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: Michelle Nunn, welcome to Babel.
Michelle Nunn: Thanks so much, Jon. It's good to be here.
Jon Alterman: You run the U.S. branch of an organization that's done relief work for more than 75 years. Where does Gaza rank in both scale and complexity in terms of things that CARE has done for all those years?
Michelle Nunn: CARE has, as you say, more than a 75-year history in dealing with complex crises, starting in post-World War II Europe. Over the last few years, we’ve seen everything from global pandemics to earthquakes, typhoons, and cyclones. But Gaza is unique, and it is a particularly fraught crisis in many ways. If you are a humanitarian, one way to describe it is that humanitarians are not used to having a kind of wall around the place where they're trying to bring relief, right? Of course, there’s humanitarian access issues in Syria and Yemen, but there is literally a corridor with a very small entry point in which only a small amount of aid can enter. Sometimes you can't get through your tent, or sometimes you can't get through your walkie-talkies, or all manner of things that are considered at different points to be “dual usage.” In other words, people are fearful that they will be utilized for terror. This is a particularly difficult gauntlet for humanitarians to grapple with.
A second thing is that people can't get out. If you think about Ukraine, if you even think about Sudan—and each one of these crises is unique; you're certainly not drawing any conclusions around comparative suffering—Gaza is unique in that even people who have cancer and people who would ordinarily be able to potentially flee a situation simply can't escape.
Then the third thing is the threshold of destruction in a short period of time and the number of casualties in the first few weeks. The total number of casualties of children, for instance, that have been killed is more than that of other conflicts around the world in the last year combined. Then, there is the precipitous decline around issues of hunger where you're going within months into acute hunger on the verge of famine, and in some pockets, a probable famine. Then there is the scale of destruction where you have more than 60 percent of actual homes that have either been partially or fully destroyed, 80 percent of commercial buildings, and most hospitals destroyed. Children have not gone to school for more than 300 days now.
All of that combined makes it a particularly vexing humanitarian crisis, and then keep in mind that over 280 humanitarian aid workers have been killed during the course of the crisis. It is a really, really difficult set of challenges.
Jon Alterman: As you think about global needs, which are profound, how do you decide how large your efforts in Gaza should be?
Michelle Nunn: Look at Sudan right now, a crisis that has been largely displaced from the headlines. We have more than 25 million people facing acute hunger. You know, you could go to Haiti. You could go to Yemen. You could go to Syria. So, there's a couple of things that happen. One is the global community—I mean the United Nations and humanitarian actors—does look at the threshold of scale, and then a proportionality of funding is declared necessary for each crisis. Humanitarian actors then work together to complement one another around that crisis.
There are always crises that don't get as much attention or don't get a high enough percentage of that total threshold of funding that the UN declares is necessary. We see crises now, I would say those longstanding crises like Yemen and Syria, where the threshold of funding is going down. That means that rations of food are going down, and families are having to face that reality. It's a combination of scale, acuteness, and determinations on issues that have an index, such as hunger, that goes into that.
But it's not entirely a science. CARE, for instance, has been working in Gaza and the West Bank for more than 70 years, and in a scale of crisis like this, given the media attention, etc., we would expect that we would have raised tens of millions of dollars. In fact, we've raised much less from philanthropic sources. We probably are raising a tenth of what we might ordinarily expect because of the politicization of the crisis and the way that it's perceived. Each one of these crises is unique, and each one faces a set of challenges and a gauntlet of issues that we have to navigate.
Jon Alterman: You talk about the politicization, and certainly Gaza has been a profoundly polarizing issue in the United States as well as around the world. Has that politicization affected what you do in Gaza?
Michelle Nunn: Only in the sense that we didn't, in those early weeks and in these months since, have some of the flexible resources that we might ordinarily have received from corporate, foundation, or individual donors. So, the capacity has been stretched. We've reached over 600,000 people in different ways. It's everything from water to shelter to health. But it has affected our capacity to support our team with the flexible resources that are so often required in a humanitarian crisis.
Jon Alterman: Have you found that hostility to what you're doing in Gaza has affected CARE overall? Are there people who say, “Well I used to give to CARE, but now that you're helping those people, I just don't want to have anything to do with them anymore”?
Michelle Nunn: I have not confronted a humanitarian situation that has drawn such a polarizing set of views and almost an inability to hold space for shared suffering, to recognize the suffering after October 7th, the enormity of the suffering of those whose families are being held hostage, and then also the enormity of the suffering of 90,000 people who have been injured and almost 40,000 that have been killed. It's been hard to hold space on both of the sides of suffering. Yes, there are a few individuals that have found that their particular viewpoints didn't include the capacity to advocate for a ceasefire, which is one of the things that humanitarian actors often do. We also have found a lot of bridging donors that have been supportive of Israel and also want to support those who are suffering in Gaza. We certainly have seen a variety of responses, but I'd like to focus on the ones that have been bridging.
Jon Alterman: How have your relations with the government of Israel been as you've tried to get assistance into Gaza?
Michelle Nunn: We work through an agency that works with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which is called the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which is a set of players that supports the humanitarian engagement of the IDF.
Jon Alterman: Led by a Druze, which is to say an Arabic-speaking Israeli.
Michelle Nunn: Yeah. In every humanitarian situation, we maintain neutrality and partiality so that we can work with both sides. We do have the capacity, and we have worked with and met with COGAT and those that are required for us to enable our humanitarian access to get things through. All of that has to be coordinated, and it is a very vexing crisis. The humanitarian community has struggled with the difficulties of getting aid through and some of the difficulties of also navigating everything, including Visas so that humanitarian actors have the capacity to come in and out of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. There are a lot of complexities, barriers, and challenges, and we continue to navigate through that.
Jon Alterman: Do you have to work through Egypt as well?
Michelle Nunn: We do, yes. We work through Jordan, and we work through Egypt. We have a set of partners and colleagues in Egypt that are bringing in relief through Egypt, so that's an important access point. Having worked in Gaza for decades, we have a network of local partners that enable us to secure and procure the capacity for partners to deliver, for instance, health, mobilization of clinics. There are all sorts of ways in which we support populations that have the enormity of 500,000 cases of acute diarrhea in a population of 2 million people and almost a million people that that have had some sort of respiratory ailments, all with a health infrastructure that's completely depleted and the difficulty of getting medicines in. A part of what we do is work from within as well as bringing supplies from outside.
Jon Alterman: Could you describe more how you work with other organizations, both international organizations as well as organizations on the ground in Gaza? Is that sort of a pick-up game? Is that just scaling up what existed before? I know that CARE focuses especially on women and children. Do you just focus on what you're good at and other people take other pieces, or is there some other way that this is working?
Michelle Nunn: When a humanitarian crisis happens, and often they are lasting for decades now, there is not always a rapid onset. But in this case, there was actually a set of humanitarian players already bringing relief into Gaza, and that has been scaled up. There are coordinating bodies, often through the UN. In this particular case, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is an entity that has a longstanding history and has been an important player within the Gaza context for many years.
Then, different agencies take on different sectors and different initiatives based upon their core competencies. For CARE, one of our core competencies is around maternal health. We have a very strong focus on working with locally based partners, and we've had these partners for many years. We have trusted relationships in which we're able to leverage resources and our capacities in that coordinated system to bring relief both geographically and in sectors that complement and hopefully enable the entirety of the community to bring the highest threshold of relief possible.
Keep in mind that all of this is during a time of conflict and war. Until there is a ceasefire, it is almost impossible for us to operate at full capacity as humanitarian players to bring the kind of relief that is required for people who have had more than 300 days of difficulty accessing food, water, and basic health provisions.
Jon Alterman: Are there any Israeli civil society organizations interested in humanitarian relief that you've been working with on your Gaza response?
Michelle Nunn: Yes, there are humanitarian actors. IsraAID is an actor that actually has done humanitarian relief around the world. They are not acting in Gaza, but they did act for the first time in their own country in the aftermath of October 7th. They've been trying to play a facilitative role with other humanitarian actors where they work in Sudan or Ethiopia, and to bring some of their knowledge and expertise as a bridge. There are other players within the broader Israeli context that do humanitarian work around the world that are potential builders of the civil society that will be a part of bridging as we move forward into the long-term.
Jon Alterman: Armies often learn lessons from fighting wars. I imagine humanitarian organizations learn lessons all the time from large-scale operations. What are the lessons CARE is taking from what it's doing in Gaza that are going to affect the way CARE works with problems around the world?
Michelle Nunn: Yeah, it's a great question. We often do after action reviews from humanitarian crises, and this one will have plenty of lessons. Also, as I said, some of this is a unique context. I think there are a couple of things. One is the importance of localized partnership and leadership. Certainly, the humanitarian community has been leaning towards localized engagement with humanitarian actors, and the recognition that, as my colleague who leads all our humanitarian efforts around the world says, the first responders are always the women and men of the community and neighborhood who are helping their neighbors and supporting their families. That's the first line of both resistance and resilience, so supporting them is important.
Then, there are local organizations. There can be a whole variety. In this case, a lot of what I would call health provision agencies are bleeding into humanitarian response capacity now. They're finding new ways of delivering babies in a fashion that they have never done before because they had institutions and hospitals. They're delivering birthing kits to shelters where people might not be able to have access. Those kinds of things are really critical to any humanitarian response. In Gaza in particular, because we also have had difficulty getting people and things in, we've had to really rely upon the local leadership and local partners. That will be a feature of the lessons that we take away from Gaza. What can we continue to do to lean into that trend as we go forward?
And then, there will be hard lessons learned, as we've seen. Because we couldn't get in the ordinary way or through the gauntlet that has been set up around the border, there were efforts to set up this humanitarian pier and build new ways of approaching it. We're going to airlift supplies and drop them into Gaza. None of that has been, and humanitarian actors have said from the beginning, anything and everything that we're doing or that we want to do, but those are not the most effective and efficient ways of getting aid through. Of course, that has turned out to be true. There were some people who were killed by dropping supplies into Gaza. There were painful lessons learned about the difficulty of building a pier in real time in a conflict zone. In large measure, we moved away from that strategy.
Some of the lessons learned will be lessons that, unfortunately, humanitarian actors have already been aware of and hopefully we can continue to take those lessons into the future.
Jon Alterman: How does CARE think about the future of Gaza and the future of its work in Gaza? The violence will stop. The needs will be profound. Where does CARE's work in Gaza fit into that future?
Michelle Nunn: We've worked in Gaza for more than 70 years, so we are there for the long-term. We are committed. I think people will rebuild their lives. Some of the things that we must recognize are, as we've discussed, the threshold of physical destruction. Secondly, the psycho-social impact of the last 300-plus days, which on any population would be extraordinary. It will be harrowing for people to continue to move through that even as we hopefully can phase into peace.
We've had the deterioration of civil infrastructure that we all rely upon, such as the police force. We've had one really big concern. Even with the ceasefire, it will be challenging to ensure that Gaza is not overtaken by gangs, that there are ways in which we can restore civil order, and that it can have basic operations for things like schools and hospitals, etc. UNRWA is going to have to play some role in that going forward in the medium-term, in the short-term, and over the long-term. All of those things are on our list.
One of the things that we focus on is women and girls and ensuring that they have the capacity to be a voice of leadership around the table for the future of Gaza, both in terms of the resolution of peace and also the enduring governance of Gaza. That's going to be important. Then, if you think about the destruction of businesses, ultimately people are going to need the livelihood restoration that will be essential to the rebuilding of their lives. We will, and CARE always does, move what we call the nexus between the immediacy of humanitarian response—where we may be delivering cash assistance, water, or shelter—and the continuing thread towards rebuilding people's lives—which can include the restoration of their jobs, of entrepreneurship and small businesses, and of all those things that go into restoring a community that has faced the enormity of the destruction that the people of Gaza have faced.
Jon Alterman: As somebody who's worked in development for many years, are there slivers of optimism that you see about what the future might hold that people don't see, or is there just a lot of hard work to get to a stable place?
Michelle Nunn: It's so hard to find hope and optimism right now in this particular situation. There are a couple of things to try and find. First, often in times of war and conflict, the position of women and their leadership becomes more recognized and lifted in a different way. We see that in the wake of World War II here in our own country and any number of conflicts. There are strong, powerful women that are leading the way in Gaza right now in terms of the resilience of their families and communities. I hope that there may be a set of turning points that allow for that leadership to be lifted as we move forward. That would be one hope.
Second, I've been following along with a number of people who are proponents of peace and who have been longstanding advocates for peace in the region. The sheer enormity of the destruction, the violence, the loss, and the suffering may precipitate over time a movement towards the necessary peaceful resolution of the conflict that can endure. Let's hope that is the case.
Jon Alterman: Michelle Nunn, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Michelle Nunn: Thank you so much.
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