In the early morning hours of February 29th, there was supposed to be an aid delivery in northern Gaza. Hundreds of starving people had gathered waiting for the trucks to arrive, but by the time it was over, over 100 people were dead. Hundreds more were injured. You might remember this. Gazans call it the Flour Massacre. Well, ever since that day, a team of CNN reporters have been digging into what happened. They obtained never before seen videos, talked to nearly two dozen eyewitnesses. Remember, the Israel Defense Forces originally said a stampede caused soldiers to fire warning shots in the air. They released a grainy drone video showing crowds of swarming people.

But the IDF footage is incomplete. It cuts between crowds surrounding the trucks and bodies lying on the ground. Even this reveals they were firing in a densely packed area, likely to cause severe bloodshed. CNN requested the full footage from the IDF, but it was denied.

Eyewitness videos also indicate the gunfire started earlier than the IDF claimed.

Analysis by weapons experts of the bursts indicate it is heavy automatic gunfire at 600 rounds per minute.

The IDF hasn't responded to questions about these discrepancies, but the incident is just a stark reminder of the calculations hungry Palestinians have to make every day. Would you rather die from hunger or from gunfire? And then there are the aid workers just trying to deliver whatever meager supplies are allowed in by Israel. The work is incredibly dangerous for them, too. What did those calculations look like?

You're constantly kind of playing this game in your head of, okay, well, do we think that this will get in or is it going to potentially, you know, cause an entire truckload to get turned around?

Today we hear from a humanitarian who just returned from Gaza from CNN. This is Tug of War. I'm David Rind.

Arwa Damon is the president and founder of the International Network for aid, Relief and Assistance. There are charity focused on providing medical and mental health care to children who have been traumatized by war. Arwa is also someone we know well here at CNN. She's a former CNN senior international correspondent and has extensive experience reporting on conflicts for over a decade. And recently, Arwa went inside Gaza to see her charity's efforts up close. She's now back home in Istanbul. I caught up with her earlier this week.

You know, I've been to a lot of war zones. I've covered a lot of humanitarian crises, and there was just something about crossing the border into Gaza that felt a little bit different. It was almost as if it was more suffocating. It was more crushing. And I think that's because of the sheer density of the people that exist, in the, in the southern part of the strip, because that's where they've all been told to go to try to stay safe. You drive through. And I was looking at people's faces and I was talking to the the goddamn team that was with me.

Hi!

And they were saying, you know, we we feel like zombies. And when we look at, you know, the faces here, it's as if we're looking at zombies. People are ghosts of themselves. And you see it in the way they walk. You see it in their eyes, you see it in their facial expressions, and then everyone is just so constantly haunted by the ghosts of everything that they that they have lost you. You go through the streets that are just. I mean, they're jam packed. It's like tents are spilling out of shelters off of the sidewalk. There's these stalls that have been set up that are kind of like selling bits and pieces. There's a crush to see, a wave of people and humanity just moving around on foot. It's clogged with donkey carts because most people don't have access to a vehicle anymore or they can't afford, you know, fuel or diesel. I mean, it's just it's crushing.

What stories stuck out to you from the people that you spoke to?

They're all, to a certain degree, all of them. But I would have to say there's one. There's one face that is really kind of in my mind. She, is a 16 year old girl. I met her in the European hospital. Her leg was amputated, at, at the ankle. She had, you know, rods, metal rods sticking out of her thigh. And we were walking by, and this, this this girl caught caught my eye because she saw us, and she kind of sat up and had, like, the biggest, beautiful smile on her face, and she had these dimples. So we went in to talk to her. And, the first thing that she said to me was, oh, I love your look. I think you dress really cool. And I laughed. I laughed because it's such, you know, it's this horribly tragic scene. And yet, you know, that's such a teenage, you know, girl thing, thing to say. Yeah. You know, and then and then she was obviously talking about, you know, what happened in the strike and, in the bed lying next to her was her, her older brother, who was a year older than she was. And they had just been brought down from the north about, a week or so ago. And her brother was completely emaciated. He was basically just just skin and bones. He wasn't really moving. He kind of, like, grunted, once in a while.

From the lack of food.

Yeah, yeah. I keep thinking back about her. I keep thinking about, you know, the father I met in the ICU who was staring at his ten year old son who'd been shot in the head.

This is Mustafa Alwanji. This is a gunshot.

Gunshot?

Yes, head gunshot.

Head gunshot?

Head, leg, and arm.

How old is he?

Ten years.

The ICU nurse said that the bullet wasn't clean and clean out. Oh, this is the garden and the was dead. oh. That's cool. That's his brother had. And his father was, was saying that, you know, his his son loved to garden. He was number one in school. I keep thinking about the mother that ran up to me after she heard, you know, that mental health was sort of one of the aspects that we work on telling telling us about her son, who's 6 or 7, who keeps screaming and going into these uncontrollable convulsions. And that that started after he saw his sister's head being blown off. I, I just. Yeah.

It's kind of what I wanted to ask, because I think our listeners have heard a lot about the relief efforts that are going on in Gaza right now, but how does a relief agency like yours actually operate in this horrible situation? Like, can you take us inside that process?

Yeah. So I mean, first of all, we were, relatively speaking, a fairly, small organization. So what we do is we have these sort of set activities that we're doing in 13 shelters, the sort of makeshift shelters that have emerged and that can range from, you know, distributing diapers to, we found these re washable, sanitary underwear that apparently are working really, really well. So we've ordered another sort of shipment of those. We've done baby milk. We do, some hot food distribution, food baskets, and then a big focus on, basically mental health activities for children. But really, what that looks like in an emergency context is it's basically playtime, right? Because while the emergency is still going on, you can't you can't focus on the sort of deep in depth kind of mental health work that needs to be done. And for us, you know, getting getting stuff into Gaza, it's really difficult. I mean, you'd think it would be super straightforward, but it's not.

I'll have more with Arwa in just a bit.

Welcome back to Tug of War. I'm speaking with Arwa Damon. She's the president and founder of the International Network for aid, Relief and Assistance.

So prior to October 7th, there is this list of, what's described as dual use items that has existed since 2008. And these are items that are banned from entry into Gaza. And then a bunch of them are also actually banned from entry into the West Bank. So that's kind of like the list that organizations, you know, would go by prior to October 7th, knowing what to bring in and what not to bring in. The big, big challenge has been that post October 7th, there are items that are not on that list that repeatedly get rejected, and the only way you find out if your shipment is going to get rejected is when it gets rejected. And all requests to the Israeli side to to sort of try to get, you know, an updated list or guidance on what can come in. They basically go unanswered. And so you have, you know, another organization was trying to bring toys. And for some reason, that shipment got turned around. You know, we were trying to put together these hygiene kits that included nail clippers, but then we were told, no, don't put the nail clippers in them, because another grips shipment with nail clippers got turned around.

And the theory is that, like, something like nail clipper could be perceived as a weapon, I guess.

I mean, yes, the theory is that. But then you also look at the sort of list that exists now of items that have been repeatedly rejected, and it's things like solar powered flashlights, solar powered refrigerators, solar panels, full stop to begin with, crutches, wheelchairs are very, very difficult to get in. And so while we're trying to, like, figure out what to send in, you're constantly kind of playing this game in your head of, okay, well, do we think that this will get in or is it going to potentially, you know, cause an entire truckload to get turned around because the pallets that contain these rejected items don't just get offloaded, that whole shipment gets turned around.

And so because time is so of the essence, you really have to make these decisions well in advance.

Yeah, you have to try, you know, and irrespective of that, it takes on average 2 to 3 weeks for a truck to get, you know, inside you can't purchase a lot of these items locally. Because there isn't the market doesn't exist for them. And then obviously, especially for organizations that are sort of doing these larger mass distributions, like Take the World Central Kitchen, for example, they all need to go through this. It's called a deconfliction process. Right. And this exists in every single war zone. And it's one, you know, aid entities communicate to warring parties, where they want to be delivering and basically get approval to use certain routes to be able to get there. That process has not worked in Gaza and basically doesn't really work. And the thing that made the World Central Kitchen strike, even more horrific than it, than it was to begin with, is that out of all the entities that operate the humanitarian entities that operate in Gaza, World Central Kitchen arguably had the best deconfliction track record and the best ties to the Israeli side. And so you have this challenge upon challenge. And then when you're actually able to get to an area, the desperation is so high, the need is so great that it's it's I mean, a lot of the time is just chaos and panic. And so you're trying to actually manage the, the distribution itself.

Right? And so with all that said, the actual dangers have been in the active war zone, all the challenges that the Israeli operation puts on aid groups trying to get stuff into Gaza. Did you and your group ever consider suspending operations or rethinking how you did this work?

No we didn't. All of our people inside Gaza are Gazans. And it was never, you know, a question for them. You know, one of our staffers was saying, you know, these these are these are my people's children that that I'm working with. You know, if I turn around and say, I can't deal with this, I don't want to do it, then who's going to step in and take my place? And so that's kind of been, you know, the general attitude among among our staff. But I have to say, like, I got into Gaza two days after the World Central Kitchen strike, and I don't think I'd ever really considered the fact that I would be as nervous going into an active war zone as a humanitarian as I was in some situations I found myself in as a journalist.

You were worried that your life was in danger.

I was, I, I was worried that, you know, I, I could be directly targeted, that, you know, people I'd spoken to, areas I'd been to. Could that end up, you know, being being hit. And when you're a journalist and you go into these spaces, you know, you carry with you a certain level of, you know, anxiety and, and fear, which is a good thing because you have to respect the danger, you know, that you're in. But then as journalists, you know, we have a tendency to go towards danger. You know, you want to capture the aftermath of, you know, the strike or this and that. You know, as, as a humanitarian, you in theory, you're kind of two steps behind that space because you're serving the population that has is fleeing or has fled. Except obviously in Gaza, there is no there is no safe space. And it's just it's a very, very unnerving.

Yeah. And I'm curious, as someone with a journalism background like yourself and having seen the situation in Gaza firsthand, what do you think is missing from the coverage of what is actually happening on the ground?

Journalists, I mean, Gazan journalists are doing an extraordinary job reporting on this. I mean, for six months straight without a break. And this isn't just a story. It's their life. It's their people. It's their tragedy. But what we're really missing in the journalism space is everybody else. You know, all the other networks and outlets that haven't been able to get in because the IDF has barred them, and that has a huge impact. You know, it's very different as a journalist to report something remotely. No matter how good the footage is on the ground, to actually being there yourself and seeing and and, you know, smelling and sensing it's the little moments that you catch out of, you know, the corner of your eye. It's the human interactions that you have with you.

Like a young girl who says you look stylish.

Exactly, exactly. And that's, you know, it's a huge missing part of this, that that sort of direct, you know, human interaction that the journalists are able to have on the ground. And it has a massive impact on, on coverage, especially when we're talking about, I mean, let's face it, you know, a conflict that the coverage of which has been criticized as being vastly dehumanizing of Palestinians.

Well, thanks for your time, IRA. I really appreciate it.

And thank you. Thanks for having me on.

And we should say, the group that manages the flow of aid into Gaza, Israel's coordinator of Government Activities in the territories, or COGAT, told CNN in the statement that, quote, "dual use products for humanitarian infrastructures are not sweepingly denied entry but are subject to security evaluations to prevent them being used by Hamas." COGAT also says certain goods are screened to ensure they are not being used for, quote, "terrorist purposes.".

Tug of War is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Caroline Patterson, Gul Tuysuz and Katie Hinman. We'll be back next week on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.