THE LAST MILE

The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza.

- DOROTHY WICKENDEN

The residents of Khan Younis cycle between fleeing bombs and trying to rebuild.

In an unheated warehouse in Rafah, Ahmad Najjar ran a power cable from the battery of a banged-up company car to his laptop and sat down to work. Najjar, a thirty-eight-year-old pharmacist, is a medical-donations officer for American Near East Refugee Aid, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It was a cold day in March, and he wore a jacket and a vest as he inventoried towers of shrink-wrapped cartons of donations. There were blood-pressure cuffs, disinfectant, and medicine, but no crutches or oxygen cylinders. Trucks headed for Gaza that contain any metal are sent back at the border.

Najjar had jerry-rigged a workstation: two stacked boxes for a chair and a larger one for a desk, where he propped his laptop to set up a distribution plan. The supplies were urgently needed. After half a year of war, fewer than a dozen hospitals in Gaza remained functional, and then just barely. Nurses used dishcloths as bandages; surgeons operated by cellphone light, steadying themselves against the booms of incoming shells.

The organization Najjar worked for, known as Anera, was founded in 1968, to provide aid to Palestinian refugees of the Six-Day War. Today, it has a permanent staff of twelve in Gaza and a hundred in the region, supplemented by volunteers and contractors as needed. Anera disperses about a hundred and fifty million dollars a year in humanitarian and development aid, from donors around the world, and oversees many of the programs that it supplies. Sean Carroll, Anera’s president and C.E.O., describes it as a “last-mile delivery partner in Gaza.”