Palestinian truck drivers describe perilous aid runs as Gaza’s blockade and bombardment push the enclave toward famine

KEREM SHALOM CROSSING / GAZA BORDER —

For nearly two years, Gaza’s most vital lifeline has not been a pipeline or a port but an uneven ribbon of asphalt running from the Kerem Shalom crossing into a territory shattered by bombardment. At its wheel sit Palestinian truck drivers hired by aid agencies and contractors, men who have watched the enclave’s hunger deepen with each mile and each checkpoint. They are not soldiers, yet they move through a battlespace; not politicians, yet their progress is hostage to politics.

On a gray morning, engines idle in a dusty queue that stretches beyond sight. Drivers swap WhatsApp updates about inspection windows and the day’s ‘deconfliction’—the fragile choreography meant to keep convoys away from airstrikes and ground fighting. The manifest on the dash lists sacks of flour, tins of chickpeas, rehydration salts. Several trucks carry water tanks patched and repatched after shrapnel punctures. No one can say where the bottleneck will be today: a hold at the Israeli scanner; a last‑minute route change; a sudden closure because of fighting miles away.

The drivers’ job, deceptively simple on paper, has mutated into endurance work. They inch forward for hours beneath surveillance balloons. At the gate, soldiers photograph plates and grill paperwork. On bad days, a single discrepancy—a barcode that doesn’t match a crate—can send the truck to the back of the line. On worse days, the line doesn’t move at all. Even when clearances arrive, the next unknown is the road inside: bridges cratered by strikes; roundabouts turned into military berms; crowds forming long before warehouses are reached.

Convoy veterans describe a ritual of calculation. If the sun dips and the route is still long, they may pull over and sleep in the cab, preferring exhaustion to the risk of driving at night. Darkness draws gunfire and theft. Starving families sometimes attempt to unload the trucks by hand; criminal groups do so with Kalashnikovs. The difference between a distribution and a stampede can be measured in minutes, or in a rumor that a particular truck carries baby formula.

Aid officials say the tragedy is structural as much as it is violent. Permissions and scans meter the flow of relief to a fraction of need, and the gap produces chaos downstream. When hundreds of people converge on a single drop point, drivers must decide—often alone—whether to push through, wait for a UN escort, or retreat and risk losing the day’s slot. Several said they now carry spare phones to hand over in robberies and keep a laminated card on the dashboard bearing the logos of multiple agencies in the hope it buys a few seconds of recognition.

The data tell the story behind the steering wheel. During brief truces early this year, United Nations officials set a target of at least 600 aid trucks a day, including fuel, to stabilize the strip. Some days the tally climbed higher; on others it plunged, as approvals were withdrawn or routes were declared unsafe without warning. In late January, humanitarian monitors recorded a sharp drop in entries on a single Friday, underscoring how fragile the pipeline remained. Even when trucks do enter, aid may sit uncollected at holding points as ground conditions deteriorate and escorts are diverted.

The consequences are visible on the roadside. Malnutrition clinics have overflowed with toddlers whose hair has lost its color and whose bellies are distended. In August, food security analysts projected that famine—long present in Gaza’s north—would expand south into Deir al‑Balah and Khan Younis, with more than half the population at emergency levels of hunger. By the UN’s count, hundreds of people have been killed in and around aid hubs in recent months, a grim metric of the peril that now attends the search for food.

For the men on the cabs, statistics translate into choices. ‘You calculate: if I go left, I might reach the warehouse; if I go straight, I might not come back,’ said one driver in an interview published this year. Others described sniper fire across intersections and ambushes by armed gangs who shadow convoys, waiting for a tire to fail. Spare parts have become scarce and expensive under import restrictions, thinning the fleet. Mechanics now strip wrecked vehicles for brake pads and fuel filters.

Logistics professionals argue that the fix is not mysterious. More gates, longer inspection windows, predictable corridors to the north, and dedicated policing of main arteries would dramatically reduce losses. Some call for a joint operations room—UN, military and humanitarian—staffed around the clock where convoy movements are logged and verified in real time, with a clear hotline when things go wrong. Others point to a basic truth: when the flow upstream is throttled, every downstream risk intensifies. Fewer trucks mean bigger crowds, which makes every stop more volatile.

None of that macro‑engineering captures the micro decisions that define a day’s run. In one convoy to central Gaza this summer, drivers crawled past burned trailers and an abandoned water tanker. The planned offload point had dissolved into a scrum, so the team diverted to a schoolyard and formed a crescent of vehicles, cabs out, engines running for a fast exit. A UN staffer climbed onto a trailer with a megaphone and split the crowd into lanes by neighborhood, but the lines collapsed when a rumor spread that a second convoy had been bombed and would not arrive. ‘Load now!’ someone shouted. A shot cracked in the distance. The drivers left with broken mirrors and a torn tarp, lucky by recent standards.

If there is a constant, it is improvisation—and the stubbornness to return tomorrow. Many drivers spent months displaced with their families or sleeping on warehouse floors to keep their slots. Their children have learned the map of holding points and the sound of the phone at 3 a.m. ‘I am not brave,’ another driver told a reporter. ‘I am useful.’ The moral calculus is lived rather than spoken: to keep the trucks rolling is to slow the freefall, one pallet at a time.

Two years into a war that has redrawn lives across the region, the men who steer the aid convoys have become unlikely historians—witnesses to a landscape where rules change by the hour. Their work cannot substitute for policy, but it can, for a day, outpace hunger. They measure success not by deliveries completed but by meals eaten and clinics restocked; not by the kilometers driven but by the ones safely returned. Tomorrow the line will form again at the crossing, where the metal detector thrums and the wind rises off the desert, and the trucks wait for a green light that might not come.

Sources and further reading

• Financial Times, “A day in the dangerous life of Gaza’s truck drivers,” September 9, 2025.
https://www.ft.com/content/e959466f-632e-4a9a-9411-4bc452958a2f

• Associated Press, “Truck drivers in Gaza face danger with each aid delivery,” August 5, 2025.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-aid-trucks-danger-34f60bfcd7c84d75e90847c70b76b302

• Reuters, “Turned back from Gaza, aid shipments languish in warehouses and roadsides,” August 13, 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turned-back-gaza-aid-shipments-languish-warehouses-roadsides-2025-08-13/

• Reuters, “UN says 915 aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday,” January 20, 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-915-aid-trucks-entered-gaza-monday-2025-01-20/

• Reuters, “Large drop in number of aid trucks entering Gaza on Friday,” January 24, 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/large-drop-number-aid-trucks-entering-gaza-friday-2025-01-24/

• IPC Global Initiative, “Gaza Strip: Acute Food Insecurity & Malnutrition — Special Snapshot,” August 22, 2025.
https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2025-08/IPC_Gaza_Strip_Acute_Food_Insecurity_Malnutrition_July_Sept2025_Special_Snapshot.pdf

• Reuters, “UN reports 798 deaths near Gaza aid hubs in six weeks,” July 11, 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/798-people-killed-while-receiving-aid-gaza-says-un-human-rights-office-2025-07-11/