SILWAD, West Bank - Getting food to impoverished Palestinians is no easy task. First, United Nations workers face the arduous ritual of getting trucks through Israeli army checkpoints; once they do, the intended beneficiaries sometimes reject the goods or sell them on the black market.
Humanitarian aid, like so much here, is a matter of politics.
One driver of a U.N. truck carrying 34,000 pounds of flour, sugar and powdered milk spent 90 minutes this week winding along narrow mountainous roads to avoid soldiers, only to find an angry mob after his arrival in Silwad, north of Jerusalem.
The people became upset that there wasn't enough food to go around, so they rejected it all in protest. The driver, Bahjat Joulani, drove to a neighboring town, Taybeh. There, a storeowner was selling bags of powdered milk from the United Nations that were clearly marked, "Not for sale."
U.N. workers said it was an unusually frustrating day.
But problems such as these are becoming more common as the job of providing humanitarian aid grows increasingly crucial in areas such as the West Bank, where the Israeli military began reoccupying most cities six months ago.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which cares for 1.5 million refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, faces a daunting challenge to help hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped in war zones, restricted by curfews and imprisoned in their towns by earthen barriers bulldozed across roads by the Israeli army.
U.N. officials recently pleaded for $94 million in emergency funds to buy enough food for 1.1 million refugees in the first six months of this year - a jump of nearly 30 percent since the army began to reoccupy the territories during the summer.
Nearly 80 percent of the 620,000 West Bank refugees displaced by Israeli-Arab wars in 1948 and 1967 are unemployed and living on $2 a day - statistics that, the United Nations warns, indicate a humanitarian disaster in the making. Studies have shown that an increasing number of people suffer from malnutrition.
Through it all, U.N. workers have to fight their own tangled bureaucracy, deal with an army that has fatally shot three U.N. employees in the past month and persuade the people whom they are trying to help to accept what is offered.
U.N. becomes target
The biggest complaint the United Nations has is that its employees feel threatened and hindered while trying to do their jobs. Fieldworkers say the internationally recognized insignia on their cars and clothes - U.N. in large blue letters - turns them into targets, making it more likely their trucks will be delayed or denied entry at military checkpoints.
Stories abound about food sitting in trucks, stuck at checkpoints for hours. Last week, Joulani said, he was barred from entering Silwad. And outside of Bethlehem a soldier sent him back, demanding that he return with a manifest written in Hebrew, not English or Arabic.
"They try to find any excuse not to let us pass," Joulani said as he drove by a military post near Silwad on Monday. "It's not just a security check - that I could understand. The army doesn't want anyone to help the Palestinian people. They don't want them to survive the curfews."
The strained relationship worsened last month when an Israeli soldier in Jenin mistook a cellular phone for a gun and fatally shot a senior U.N. relief worker from Great Britain. The army said Palestinians were shooting from a U.N. compound, and they were returning fire, which U.N. officials denied.
Israeli officials allege that the U.N. relief agency unwittingly protects and helps Palestinian militant groups. Gunmen, they say, turn U.N. schools and offices into hideouts and use U.N. vehicles to elude soldiers.
Army officials said that 23 U.N. workers have been arrested, accused of ties to extremist groups. Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called U.N. demands that its trucks be allowed to pass through army checkpoints without security checks unreasonable.
"UNRWA is not the enemy," he said. "We have a vested interest in seeing the U.N. succeed in its mission to help the Palestinians and prevent more poverty and more despair that will only hurt our own long-term goals. Why should we try to damage that?"
Capt. Peter Lerner, the army liaison officer to international aid groups, said that the United Nations has about 230 vehicles and 4,200 employees, mostly Palestinian, moving about the West Bank and Gaza on any given day and that while complaints arise, they are few when compared with the high traffic volume.
He also said the United Nations, unlike the Red Cross, does not coordinate its movements with the army beforehand, meaning that its vehicles show up at checkpoints unannounced and often without paperwork that could speed their passage.
At the same time, Lerner said, official Israeli policy is to "let the humanitarian agencies do all their activities. There is no hunger in the West Bank, and we don't want there to be hunger. We want stability."
But 42-year-old Joulani says it looks to him as if the security checks are designed to prevent aid from getting through. On Monday, it was his job to deliver a truckload of flour, rice, sugar and powdered milk to Silwad, a village of about 2,500 people.
On a map, the trip looks easy. A smoothly paved double-lane road runs up the spine of the West Bank and passes less than a mile from Silwad's entrance. Joulani did some early-morning reconnaissance and discovered the Israeli army had blocked the quickest and easiest route.
He mapped out an alternate way and began his long, lumbering journey in a heavy truck that could barely pass by donkey carts on steep inclines. When he got to his turnoff, he found another surprise: That, too, was barricaded with large concrete blocks.
A soldier stood inside a barbed-wire fence on the other side of the road and looked at the truck but made no effort to stop it. The soldier's gaze grew more intense as Joulani jerked the wheel back to the right to avoid the newly closed road.
The small houses and the mosque minaret of Silwad could be seen from the truck's windows but getting there by vehicle was for the moment impossible. "That's where we need to go," he said, pointing to the town. "There are people suffering, and I can't reach them."
Joulani shrugged his shoulders and drove on, finally stopping a farmer riding a tractor to get directions that took his truck over rugged hillsides, a painfully slow trip that took 90 minutes on one-lane switchbacks and on roads too small to make most maps.
Crowd turns angry
When he finally rumbled into Silwad, hundreds of Palestinians swarmed the truck while clutching their U.N. identity cards and quickly rushed workers with paperwork to claim their food.
But it took only a few minutes before the crowd grew angry. The truck was filled with enough food for 330 families, about half the number of registered refugees in Silwad. To protest, everyone rejected the aid.
About a dozen men and women surrounded a white U.N. van that had accompanied the truck and shouted at the people inside.
"If we all don't get food, then none of us get food," said Mohammed Ismail Omar, 55, a painter who has been out of work for two years. "The U.N. is playing politics. They want to make the number of refugees smaller by reducing the amount of food they give out."
Mohammad Husseini, a UNRWA spokesman in Jerusalem, said he was "astonished to hear" what happened in Silwad but added that his agency "simply can't meet the demands." He said social workers who conduct home visits determine who is eligible for donations. "We can't feed the entire Palestinian population," he said.
U.N. workers in Silwad huddled and called their Jerusalem headquarters. One U.N. official privately blamed the problem on a "lack of coordination in the town and with our office." He then announced that "there will be no distribution here today."
Joulani jammed his large vehicle into gear, and it slowly lurched out of the village. He headed for Taybeh.
Taybeh is a small, predominantly Christian village - it has three churches and 1,500 people, along with the ruins of a Crusades-era church - and no mosques. It is home to the only Palestinian brewery. About 200 of its residents are classified as refugees.
Word quickly spread as the truck rumbled in to the town center. Lines of people arrived in cars and tractors and on horseback.
"This will feed me for a month," said Edward Masse, 55, an unemployed laborer. He supports a wife and seven children, who, though between 16 and 29 years old, still live at home and, like him, can't find work. "The Israelis won't let me out of this village, and without this food, we would starve."
Complaints about food
Morris Naber, 50, agreed. But as he picked up the heavy flour sacks, sending up a cloud of white dust that covered his jeans, he complained that the flour was so poor that it simply crumbled when it got wet: "It's so bad you can't use it."
Down the hill another difficulty lay in wait. The owner of Abu Naber's minimarket, Daeb Khoury, 63, was openly advertising his newest product with a sign that read: "We have U.N. milk for sale."
Inside, sharing space on a rack with potato chips, were silver 2.2-pound foil bags of powdered milk, which was supposed to be in the hands of needy families but became the latest marketing strategy.
Khoury said he had paid refugees 11 Israeli shekels, or about $2.25, for each bag and was selling them for 12 shekels, about $2.50. He complained that he had made a bad deal. "I can't sell any of them," he said.
The U.N. truck sat idling out front, loaded with 110 more bags of powdered milk. Villagers said they don't like it - and doubt its nutritional value. A U.N. supervisor scowled as he read the advertisement.
"This," he said, "is a problem."