COGAT: UN massively undercounts Gaza aid trucks

The United Nations offered data that significantly underrepresented the actual amount of aid being let into the Gaza Strip by Israel, the Jewish state’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said on Tuesday.

COGAT’s statement, which claimed that the United Nations was counting only 3,553 trucks out of nearly 9,200 that had entered Gaza since May, followed the release of data by COGAT on Sunday, showing a significant increase in the number of aid trucks in Gaza. COGAT cited those figures as an example of how the United Nations can step up its efforts.

In Tuesday’s statement about the global body’s alleged undercounting of aid trucks, COGAT wrote, “The UN publishes its figures through a public dashboard that claims to present a full picture of all humanitarian aid, but in practice it includes only the trucks facilitated by UN agencies and a small number of aid organizations working with them.”

The dashboard, COGAT added, “fails to include aid delivered by other actors in the humanitarian system, including various states, additional international organizations, the private sector, airdrops, and the distribution centers of the American company.”

In the data released on Sunday, COGAT published a chart showing that the aid truck collection at the Gaza crossings stood at 2,250 from Aug. 10 to Aug. 16, compared to just 200 in the week of July 13-19.

“The U.N. proves yet another week it can step up collection efforts. But the UN isn’t the only actor. Other organizations and countries send in the majority of aid. There’s no quantitative limit to the number of trucks. The U.N. just has to bring in all the trucks they say they can,” COGAT said.

COGAT stated on Monday that hundreds of aid trucks were still waiting on the Gaza side of the crossings to be collected.

A total of 370 humanitarian aid trucks entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom and Zikim crossings on Monday, according to COGAT, with 350 collected and distributed by the United Nations and international organizations.

Furthermore, tankers of U.N. fuel entered for the operation of essential humanitarian systems, and 180 pallets of aid were airdropped in cooperation with Jordan, the UAE, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Singapore and Indonesia.