On the Ground in Gaza: An Aid Worker Describes Continuing Violence and Fear

Rasha Abouselem has been a humanitarian aid worker since 2014. In December she was in Gaza preparing a field assessment for an aid organization there. She reports on the conditions she found there, the violence Palestinians continue to live with despite the ceasefire, the ongoing shortfall in aid, and the uncertainty and trauma Palestinians are living with. She says the media is not reporting on the reality in Gaza.

Transcript

MP: This is Understanding Israel Palestine. I’m Margot Patterson, the producer of this week’s episode. I’ll be talking with a humanitarian aid worker about conditions in  the Gaza Strip,, but first news.

Moving forward on Phase 2 of President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, the Trump administration has appointed Dr. Ali Sha’th  to lead a national committee for the administration of Gaza and announced a new executive board serving  the Board of Peace chaired by Trump.  Those named to the Executive Board include US.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former UK prime minister Tony Blair,, and national security advisor Robert Gabriel.  UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, called the body the “Executive Board of the Gaza Spoils. ’Invitations to join the board of Peace hav been extended to a dozen different world leaders as well, Those countries that pledge $1 billion will have permanent membership.Other countries that join will be members for 3 year

Israel has demolished more than 2,500 buildings in Gaza since the cease-fire in October began, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery.. Many of the demolitions have been in Israeli-controlled areas in Gaza, others have been in areas under Hamas control where the Israeli military had agreed to halt its operations. “Israel is destroying everything in front of it.homes, schools, factories and streets.” The Times quoted Shaul Arieli, a former Israeli military official saying, “This is absolute destruction,” “It’s not selective destruction. It’s everything.

Jewish Settlers rampaged through the Bedouin hamlet of Khirbet Al-Sidra in the Occupied West Bank Jan. 17 and Jan. 18. Footage obtained by the Associated Press showed dozens of settlers attacking Palestinians and international activists and  settling fires to homes and cars. As of Sunday afternoon, no arrests had bee reported. It was the latest incident in  a familiar pattern of almost daily settler attacks on Palestinian property and persons in the West Bank.

My guest today is Rasha Abouselem, a humanitarian aid worker who since 2014 has worked in over 40 refugee camps throughout the globe.  She was in Gaza in December under contract to an aid organization. Because Israel in early January banned 37 humanitarian agencies from working in Gaza, and the organization she went to Gaza with is under Israeli review,  Rasha has asked that we not disclose its name for fear that something she might say could be used as a reason to ban it as well.

MP: Rasha, welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine. 

RA: Thank you for having me 

MP: Rasha, so many questions about your work, you and above all conditions on the ground in Gaza. What's the situation you found there? Did it correspond with your expectations and what were your expectations before you arrived?

RA: It did actually correspond with my expectations, but that's only because I have 11 years of field experience under my belt. So I was aware of what the.situation would be on the ground with the needs and also because I've had other friends who've served there before me.

I also have friends who live there Palestinians who live in Gaza, sending me videos and updates. So I was aware ,but it absolutely did not correspond to what the media is showing, which is a whole other issue. And I was aware that the media was not portraying the actual.reality on the ground appropriately. 

MP: Could you say more about how it didn't correspond with what the media was showing? 

RA:  First and foremost is  this idea of a ceasefire. And I'm using air quotes here, people can't see me. Ceasefire literally means a cessation of the fire. Meaning there would be no strikes, no attacks. And on the contrary, there were, I counted and experienced daily airstrikes. Drones were constantly flying fighter jets. Navy ships from the sea were shooting out. These are, what I experienced there in addition to this idea that the famine has officially ended and that there's a, much more humanitarian aid coming in, in addition to consumer goods.

The situation with the humanitarian aid is what it was before in that it's not being, dispersed appropriately. The situation is just so unstable and unpredictable. It's very difficult to do a properly organized, properly run distribution on a large scale, no less.

In addition to that, the consumer goods part, people just assume, oh, people can just buy what they need and the prices have significantly dropped since before the ceasefire. Now, that is true for the most part, but what people tend to forget is the vast majority of the Palestinians there can't afford anything.

They haven't been able to work for  two years at least, many of them because a lot of the banks have been destroyed. They've lost a lot of their money. People outside of the area tend to observe it in a very superficial manner, so they're not really thinking about the actual daily realities that the Palestinians have to face. So being able to go and see it firsthand and bring back the stories is crucial. 

MP: Are medical supplies getting in? What's the state of medical care there? Most hospitals in Gaza came under Israeli attack at one point or other. Many became inoperable. Have those hospitals open? Do they have what they need? 

RA: No, absolutely not. I would say currently the situation with the medical aid is far worse now than what the food aid is. All of my colleagues, whether they're from the organization that I met through the organization or from other organizations there who were medical, all of them said the same thing.

First of all, none of us were able to bring in any supplies of any kind, especially medical .Medical aid is still not permitted to come in or very small scale compared to what's actually needed. It's maybe trickling in and only unde, very strict conditions  that's given by the Israeli government.

What is happening and it's very frustrating and you'll hear this especially from the medical folks, is that they might allow in certain specialists, say cardiologists or neurologists or, things like that to come in, but they're not allowing them to have or to bring in any of the equipment that they require for surgeries or treatment.

So some specialists are coming in, but they have very little, sometimes nothing, that they need to actually be able to treat the people properly. It makes no sense. The hospitals are. very under understaffed, underpaid.  Some of the staff is running on no payment. Some are getting paid due to the international NGOs, but we know now that's a situation that might change as well, where they might prohibit the funding coming in internationally, which is going to cause a drastic and dangerous change to the ground situation.

I went to the remaining functioning hospitals. I went to all of them and I would say all of them are to some degree, damaged, some much more than others. There isn't anything that's left untouched is what I saw. It was incredibly, I want to  say post-apocalyptic, but it's not really a post situation, but it looked like, something out of a Mad Max movie. It looked like just atomic bomb after atomic bomb had gone off in the, region. It was just something surreal. And when you realize that these hospitals are trying to function in these conditions it's terrifying. 

MP. What was your remit in Gaza? What did the aid organization you were working for want you to do there and where were you based?

RA: I was traveling throughout south , central, north. The base was in Khan Younis, along with a lot of other NGOs that were there. And some of them are now banned from the groups that are banned. Khan Younis is the second largest city, within Gaza, following Gaza City. I did ground assessment. Some portions were dealing with amputees, some were dealing with orphans and unaccompanied and separated children. The organization was doing some distributions, so I was also there for that and visiting some of their ground locations throughout the green zone area that's now remaining.

MP: The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported at at the beginning of April, 2025. that 39,384 children in Gaza had lost one or both parents After 18 months of war, about 17,000 children had lost both parents. That was nine months ago. Another 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since, so the numbers of children, deprived of parents has surely gone up. Are most parentless children living in orphanages? What are conditions like there? 

RA:. No, unfortunately they don't. Unfortunately many are just throughout the camps. You have some just nice families looking after them or neighbors or people who knew their families that are looking out for them, or extended families that are caring for them. But you have to remember also that some entire families have been wiped out of the registry. So the ones who have  absolutely no family left or sometimes no one knows who their family is. We've seen cases of that where it takes months , orI they still can't find who their extended family members are to be able to at least hand them over back to the family.

It's a very unfortunate and desperate situation. But that's also because we can't get in and properly assess and deal with the situation.And the same thing with the schools. We can't properly get in and assess. You have a lot of children that are just roaming around the camps not getting even re partial education. It's a situation we can literally change overnight, but the world chooses not to.

MP: I want to ask you about the physical conditions of Palestinians there, but also the mental and emotional conditions of people who have been subjected to two years of a war notable for brutality. Did people seem to be coping. Did they seem to be shell shocked? I'm sure there’s a range of responses. What was your overall takeaway?

RA. I’m glad, Margot, that you mentioned that because I also did some mental health, psychosocial assessment while I was there on a very basic level. So we as aid workers and human rights activists and anyone within this field, we all know that it's not even an exaggeration, but literally a hundred percent of the Palestinian population within Gaza's is suffering from trauma.

And you can't call it post because there's nothing post yet. It's still absolutely ongoing. So you have two years of unrelenting ongoing violence. Even during the ceasefire, you're still having airstrikes. You're still having people getting killed. When I was there, just within the camp area I was in, one night I counted, in a couple hours, 11, 12 airstrikes, and one of them had hit a tent and killed a family of six while they were sleeping. This false narrative that's pushed about a ceasefire is an absolute lie, but we take it as, oh, there's less killing, so it's okay.

And the people can celebrate and you could even see them be relieved by that, even though they are still incredibly stressed, still incredibly —  I don't want to say paranoid 'cause it's not a paranoia, it's a real threat. It's a real fear. They are terrified and it becomes the norm when you're in that level of stress around the clock for years at a time, it becomes your norm.Your body starts to learn how to live that way and it doesn't know any other. The saddest part to me was seeing the children who don't know any different, because they didn't know anything before that, or they were too young to remember, or the babies who are born and the familiar sounds they know are drones and bombs. You wonder what that's going to do to their mentality as they get older and, however the situation changes, how that's going to impact them in the long term. This is unprecedented. What we're seeing in Gaza is an absolute nightmare on so many levels. And we, again, as in the professionals who deal in any realm of this kind of situation, whether it's medical aid, psychological, this is very new. We're all scrambling to figure out how to deal currently versus what is going to end up happening, in the quote “day after” when we could really start dealing with the aftermath of it, 

MP. About 1.9 million Palestinians out of a population of 2.3 million people in Gaza have been displaced by war many, multiple times. The vast majority do not have homes to go back to.They don't have offices or workplaces either to go back to. Schools, offices, workplaces have been destroyed along with homes. People are living in a situation that doesn't allow them to work, where work doesn't exist or isn't feasible. How are they getting by? What do they use for money? 

RA: Imagine suddenly war coming to your region, attacking it. You lose your home, you lose everything in your home. All you have are the clothes on your back. You lose all your documents. Y our bank gets attacked, so you can't access your bank anymore. How are you supposed to live at that point? That's what people really don't understand. There's barely money exchange. Some banks are still functioning, but they take an in incredibly high fee to withdraw any type of cash. I'm talking about 40, 50 percent, obviously because there's isn't much cash flow. Some people do electronic exchanges if they have money to exchange with.

Really the only ones that are getting some type of income — whether or not it's accessible is another story —but some type of income are the ones who work for international aid agencies, whether it's medical or aid or what have you.  Because outsiders are depositing money into their accounts. There's a very serious threat that might change. We're all holding our breath on what the next move is by Israel, whether or not they're going to start now coming down on that.

Everything that you see on social media and the videos, people. Hands up in the air, desperate for anything to be handed to them in aid, distribution lines. The crowd swarming eight trucks, people ripping, taking things down from eight trucks from the back end, just so desperate to get anything because they're so worried that they're not gonna be able to get it once it's in the warehouse. All of that I've seen with my own eyes. And it's an absolute intentional policy of deprivation. 

MP: Rasha, I understand there's a big problem with solid waste and that material isn't being let in that would deal with that. I have the impression of kind of a vast sewer pit. I hope that's not the case.

RA: And this is not, again, not unusual. I've dealt with this in other camps, but at least in other camps, at some point, wash stations are set up. There is some type of waste removal or some way of dealing with waste. In Gaza, not so much.I'd see little children running around in like little mud or even just whatever.muddy pits are there. And yes, absolutely there's absolutely human waste in there. And large piles of just garbage waste. Even the goats are eating out of it  and children playing barefoot in it. The situation with the sanitation is absolutely horrific.

MP: If you’re just tuning in this is Understanding Israel Palestine. I’m Margot Patterson and I’m talking to Rash Abouselem about her visit to Gaza in December on a humanitarian aid mission. 

I want to to ask you more about the ban on 37 humanitarian aid organizations that went into effect on January 1st. That ban includes some of the most well-known aid organizations in the world, doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, the American Friend Service Committee, and 30 more. They were asked to meet new vetting requirements for staff, and they have said those requirements endanger staff. Israel has charged that some militants work for these organizations. An allegation, it has also made about UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian refugees, which it has banned from operating in Gaza since March of 2025. It has denied  International staff entry, and as of December the Israeli parliament voted to cut off electricity, water, fuel, and communications at all UNRWA facilities. How has the ban on UNRWA affected people in Gaza? How will banning the 37 aid organizations affect people's lives there, do you think?

RA: Oh it's not even a question. Absolutely, a hundred percent it will. .If we're talking about whether or not UNRWA was doing work out there, yes, they absolutely were doing appropriate work out there. A lot of people depended on them. And it's such an easy get out of  jail free card for Israel to just say, “Oh, militants.” No proof. Just “Oh, militants.” Thirty-seven NGOs? “Militants.”  Schools? Militants. Hospitals? Militants. Because as a world we've accepted that. We are to blame. They get away with it because we let them get away with it.

We never ask for solid proof. We never say, it doesn't matter if there's one militant. It makes no sense to ban an entire organization. That's like finding out someone who worked at a bank committed a crime. You don't go punish everyone in the bank. Someone from your community committed a crime, you go punish everyone in the community? That makes absolutely no sense. Collective punishment under international law is illegal, but we're not talking about legality here because this transcends all laws and even basic common sense. We've gone far beyond that. So for Israel to come out and say these 37 aid organizations. We want the names of your staff to vet them. That is absolutely endangering them. 

First of all, they know who they are. Let's be really honest. They know who they are. They know who all the workers are. What they're doing is using this as an excuse to start banning organizations by saying, look, you guys aren't following our rules. If you just followed our rules, then you could work there. 

What they do is create stricter and stricter instructions and bigger obstacles that, under any other circumstance, anywhere, no one is  expected to abide by or even put out as a rule. But in this situation, everything when it comes to Gaza is the exception to the rule.

They're removing some of the biggest, most well-known, most impactful organizations. The real question should be is why. Is there something that they're prepping for that's coming up? That they want to make sure so many INGOs are out of the picture for?

MP: I was, wondering if you had any thoughts about the intention of these bans, is it really to cut down on militants or, 

RA: There’s literally zero proof. Literally zero proof about  this accusation of militants. This is, again, just such an easy go-to get out of jail-free card, free pass for the Israeli government to use because that's the excuse that shuts people up. We're not gonna question it because if we question it, then we must be siding with militants, which is absolutely ridiculous.

I've never been to a situation where so many NGOs have been accused of having militants within their system. Palestinians, we're the exception to the rule because we've been made out to be this enemy from adult to baby. Every single one of us, we must be militants. So if anyone's associated with us, then that's the reason. So this is how they're framing it. And to me -- this is just my opinion -- I feel like there is a next big move coming up where they're trying to make sure a lot of these major INGOs are out of the picture.  INGOs meaning international non-governmental organizations and making sure they're out of the picture so that way they could continue with the next phase of taking over Gaza. 

MP: What are Palestinians in Gaza thinking in terms of the future, or is daily life so difficult there that they are just concentrated on surviving? 

RA: That’s also a really good question. It's a little of both. It ebbs and flows, You'll see times where they'll talk about.”You know when things stop and we get to go home and rebuild." You’ll get talk like that. Or, “Rasha, one day, after all this is done, you'll come to our house we'll rebuild and we’ll make dinner for you “and things like that.

And then you'll have the, “We hear the border might open, but it only might be an exit. And should we go? S hould we not go? What's waiting for us outside or, "This has to end someday” to “They're gonna take all of it. What's going to happen to us?"  It ebbs and flows. In the beginning, I would say the people I've spoken to, at least, they had a little more hope.

But now as it's been over two years and the situation's only getting worse that hope is starting to decline. A lot of them are just hanging on by thread. Even if it's not full hope. The ceasefire, even though they see that people are dying every day still; air strikes are still happening every day there. It's still better than before. So we have to cling  onto that. That's the level of desperation they've drove them to, which is so inhumane.

They talk about what was before, “Oh, Rasha, you should have seen Gaza before. “And I'm like, “You guys realize you were still living under oppression before, right? Like you were living under apartheid before and military occupation. “But because it was a slow genocide and ethnic cleansing,  because it wasn't this full- scale genocide that rapidly unfolded, that's the crumbs they want them to wish for. And, again, this is a very inhumane thing to do. I told them, "you guys deserve to have full freedom, like all of us. You don't have to have that as a goal in mind." What was before was still oppression. 

So this is a very dangerous idea that we're plugging into their heads that you should have been thankful for the oppression you had before, because it wasn't as bad as what you have now. This is ,again, very cruel. It’s just wrong. We wouldn't want that for ourselves. I don't see why on earth we're okay with it for anyone else.

MP: Rasha you have a master's in international relations. How did you become a humanitarian aid worker?

RA: I became one in 2014. I received my BA from John Jay, college of Criminal Justice in New York City in international Criminal Justice. It's very broad, but I wanted to concentrate on human rights and refugees. And it took me several years before I took my very first trip. It was during the Syrian civil war. I ended up going to Jordan and spent a month out there with the Syrian refugees. I originally wanted to photo document my time with and stories from the people I was meeting. And I did do that in the beginning for a little bit. 

The transition into actual field work happened in Lesbos, Greece, the island in Greece. It was about 2016 when I went and the refugees were coming in on the rafts from Turkey. I had my camera.  I was planning on photo documenting, but then I realizedI was much more beneficial helping, especially because for the first several days I was there, I was the only Arabic speaker on that shore. Everyone else was European and they did not speak Arabic. I put my camera down and just started to do that. And then from there, everything just escalated into aid, distribution, emergency response ,project development and the rest is history for me.

MP:I know some of the aid you've done as a independent aid provider. How did you happen to start doing that and how are those trips different than when you're working under contract for an aid agency? 

RA: Really my time in Greece was the most impactful for how I  ended up working. I do, yes, independent aid work, which is not, I know it's unusual, so I have to explain a lot to people 'cause they don't really understand what I mean. So either I'll decide on a destination, or a lot of times I'll have people actually ask me, Hey, we need some help here. Can you do this in this project? For example, I've been out to the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh for several years in a row, and I've done emergency food and water distribution to hand water pumps, solar water pumps. I've done bamboo shelters for families. I'll usually go out to a place once I have it in mind. I'll do two, three days worth of ground assessment. I'll build my contacts and then I'll go from there. So whatever funds people are sending me are for those projects that I have. That's pretty much how it's built up. 

It's become a norm for me. I'm quite comfortable doing it that way. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it seems to work for me. The reason why. I prefer to do it that way. When you're a affiliated with a particular NGO, especially the large ones, you have a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape. Also, I've seen years and years of incredibly bad field practices that have left a bad taste in my mouth. And from every NGO you can imagine, big, small very well known ones that would shock you. I've seen that repeatedly. i'm just not comfortable compromising my integrity for things like that. I've also been granted access to locations that normally if I was associated with an NGO, they wouldn't allow me access. They've told me because I'm an individual, they've given me access. It has its pros and cons. I just prefer to work that way. 

MP: Your mention of bad field practices. What defines a bad field practice? Could you give us some examples of bad field practice as opposed to good field practice?

RA: People romanticize the humanitarian field and that's not unexpected. I totally get it. It's supposed to be altruistic. It's supposed to be, good hearted people who are going out and helping others and they have nothing else on the agenda except doing good.I understand why people get that perception, but I gotta tell you, it is a field full of egos. Full of competition over donor funds. That's really what it comes down to. NGOs at the end of the day are businesses. It's a business that has to exist and it won't keep existing unless there's a reason why it needs to exist. And it also won't keep existing if it's not getting the donor funds to run its programs and to also pay for its workforce. It's people working, so they should get paid. The expectation that everyone needs to do it free of charge all the time is also ridiculous.

But compared to other fields in the world, there’s expectations when it comes to humanitarian work. So how do agencies compete with each other for funding? It comes down to statistics.  I'm gonna leave a little room for error here. Just about every aid organization that I've come across has tweaked their stats and some of the larger, very well known ones their field workers. Unfortunately we're not having honest conversations within our field on these kind of situations. 

MP: A couple of questions before we close. You've described some, frustrating experiences as a humanitarian aid worker, but you keep doing it. Why do you keep doing it? 

RA: That goes back to that question of altruism. A lot of people feel like you can't get anything out of it. I think that's an unfair expectation. We could still be altruistic and actually receive something positive from it. I wish I didn't have a job in that sense because that means conflicts wouldn't be happening, emergencies wouldn't be happening outside from natural disaster emergencies. I wish I had nothing to really respond to.

Unfortunately, there is. But if there's anything that I can say I is the most impactful to me in a positive way are the people that I meet. Sharing a meal in someone's tent when there's no electricity, but we're sitting there on the ground  in their tent, having their children climb on top of me while, braiding my hair, in the dark or going to a wedding in a tent, or walking in a forest with some refugees towards a border and making sure they're okay. It's these moments and you don't have to speak the same language, but it is so impactful. I'm stuttering 'cause I'm having trouble explaining the feeling of this. It is at the most basic human level that I've come across. These memories as difficult as they are because of the situation, I'd be lying to you if I said those weren't the moments that I hold onto the most. I don't have to speak the same language. I've met people I don't speak the same language as them and I’m there to do work.

But when you're at that most basic level, words don't matter. Words don't matter. Sometimes we're not even speaking. Someone just looked at me and smiled a certain way and it's etched into my head. I will never, ever forget some of those moments. And that's why I keep doing it. 

I keep doing it because I want people —they might never remember my name, my face, nothing. But if there's one thing that I hope they remember is that they felt like someone cared. And that's literally all I want. I want them to know somebody cares.

MP: Rasha, you've worked in a lot of different places. You've said 45 refugee camps around the world. How did this visit to Gaza affect you? Was it different from any other place or. one more experience out of many interesting experiences. 

RA: When I was there, I had a lot of the Palestinians ask me, Rasha, have you ever seen anything like this? And I said, anything in what sense?  They'd say the refugee camps. I'm like, “Yeah, actually, I've worked in the world's largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, which is for the Rohingyas, over 800,000 people. Yes. And they've had ones, dozens up across to the Myanmar border, with tens of thousands of people. Yes I've seen this large- scale form of displacement. And in camps, 

I said, “What is new to me is the level of destruction that I'm seeing. Just utter devastation. Apocalyptic. Obliterated.” These words that just kept popping to my mind. I'm standing and looking at all this destruction, and some places have been completely leveled, like you’d never think there was life there before. Some places have been cleared out, so it's just flat. Other places are all just destroyed, crumbled infrastructure. And you know that there's, at this point, possibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead underneath that rubble that we will never ever. get back 'cause they're gonna bulldoze them away. Gaza has turned into one giant graveyard. And if they really do plan on building  this Riviera or whatever, whatever's going to be built on is gonna be built on the bones and the blood of Palestinians that have been killed.

So that that was very new to me. The active violence, the drones, the navy ships shooting, the fighter jets, the airstrikes constantly. I didn't sleep for the whole time I was there. Whenever I doze off, off, you'd hear a boom and then the whole building would shake and, or you'd see the light, the night sky light up because the airstrike was so close. But that was the reality of what was happening there. 

MP: Rasha Abouselem,, thank you so much for talking to us today. 

RA: Thank  you so much. I I hope I gave a little insight into what's. What's happening there? 

MP: That was Rasha Abouselem describing conditions on the ground in Gaza when she was there in December on a humanitarian aid mission This is Understanding Israel Palestine.