Around 520 trucks of aid have entered Gaza Strip from Egypt since war began

The number of aid trucks that have entered the Gaza Strip in the last month has now reached a little over 520, according to the US State Department -- roughly the number that the United Nations sent in daily before the war between Israel and Hamas began.

The numbers are striking on two fronts. First, the current deliveries are inadequate relative to the needs of Gaza's population: While a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, said Tuesday that 526 trucks had entered since Oct. 7, aid organizations say at least 100 such trucks are needed daily.

Second, the numbers show the extent of Gaza's dependence on the United Nations for essential supplies, which long predated the war.

For 74 years, Gaza has relied on the UN aid, delivered via the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA. Originally established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to provide temporary assistance to Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes, UNRWA grew to become a prominent employer in Gaza, where the unemployment rate for adults is around 50 per cent. More than 10,000 UNRWA staff members work in Gaza, according to its website.

"We had an education department, a health care department," Hector Sharp, the UNRWA head of field legal office, told The New York Times last month, speaking from Gaza. "We were building more schools, health care clinics. We had projects to build roads and playgrounds."

The agency provides loans and housing assistance and runs schools for almost 300,000 children, which have now sheltered the almost 630,000 displaced Palestinians since Israel began retaliating for the Hamas assaults on Oct. 7.

"Essentially," Sharp said, "for the last few decades we have been operating a parallel government in Gaza."

That extensive involvement has also made UNRWA unusually vulnerable. In the last month, 89 UNRWA employees have been killed and at least 26 have been injured in Gaza. "More UN aid workers have been killed in recent weeks than in any comparable period in the history of our organization," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Monday in a post on X, formerly Twitter.