A long-awaited carrying humanitarian aid crossed into southern Gaza on Saturday for the first time since Israel began , as Israel’s military pounded northern Gaza and warned it would increase its attacks.
US President Joe Biden cheered the arrival of the aid after days of intense negotiations and said the United States was committed to ensuring more assistance would enter via southern Gaza Strip’s
“We will continue to work with all parties to keep the Rafah crossing in operation,” Biden said in a statement.
Twenty flatbed trucks, flying white flags and honking their horns, exited the crossing after checks and headed into Gaza’s southern area which includes the major towns of Rafah and Khan Younis where hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by Israel’s unrelenting air war are sheltering.
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza Strip enter from Egypt in Rafah. Source: AAP / Haitham Imad/EPA
Israel’s “total siege” of Gaza, launched after the 7 October cross-border attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants, has left the enclave’s 2.3 million people running out of food, water, medicines and fuel.
Palestinian officials were disappointed that fuel supplies were not included in the consignment of food, water and medical supplies and added that the aid was only 3 per cent of what used to get into
“Excluding the fuel from the humanitarian aid means the lives of patients and injured will remain at risk. Gaza hospitals are running out of the basic requirements to pursue medical interventions,” the Gaza health ministry said.
The United Nations said the convoy included life-saving supplies would be received and distributed by the Palestinian Red Crescent, with the consent of Hamas, which rules Gaza.
UN officials say at least 100 trucks daily are needed and that any aid operation must be sustainable at scale – a tall order with Israel carrying out bombardments day and night that have wrecked entire populated districts.
Before the , an average of about 450 aid trucks were arriving daily in Gaza.
Most of Gaza’s inhabitants depend on humanitarian aid. The heavily urbanised and widely impoverished territory has been under Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the enclave in 2005. Source: ABACA / Middle East Images/ABACA/PA/Alamy
No diplomatic breakthrough in Egypt
Diplomacy to secure a ceasefire has been fruitless so far.
Arab leaders at a hastily convened Cairo summit on Saturday condemned the Israeli bombardment of Gaza as Europeans said civilians should be shielded, but with Israel and senior US officials absent there was no agreement on containing the violence.
Israel had kept up air strikes on targets around Gaza in Saturday’s early hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “fight until victory” following the release of the first two hostages by Hamas.
Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari in the north, and called on Gazans to move south to get out of harm’s way.
“For your own safety move southward, we will continue to attack in the area of Gaza City and increase attacks,” Hagari said in a briefing to Israeli reporters.
The humanitarian aid that has entered to UNRWA, from Egypt, we are supervising it to ensure that the water medicine and water are distributed in this humanitarian area we have set.”
Hamas on Friday Americans Judith Tai Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, who were among around 210 kidnapped in the on southern Israel by Hamas this month. Hamas said it acted in part “for humanitarian reasons” in response to Qatari mediation.
when they burst out of the blockaded enclave into Israel and killed 1,400 people, mainly civilians, in a shock rampage.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Saturday Israel’s air and missile strikes had killed at least 4,385 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while over a million of the territory’s people have been displaced.
Israel has amassed tanks and troops near the fenced border around the narrow coastal enclave for a planned ground invasion with the objective of annihilating Hamas, after several inconclusive wars dating to its seizure of power there in 2007.
In a video distributed by the Israeli military, Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi told troops: “We are going to go into the Gaza Strip … to destroy Hamas operatives and Hamas infrastructure and we will have in our mind the memories of the images and those who fell on Saturday two weeks ago.”
Israeli troops have carried out live fire drills “in preparations for the next stage of war”, footage released by the Israeli army on Saturday showed.
Amid mounting international concern the conflict could widen, Blinken on Saturday cautioned Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati in a call that the Lebanese people would be affected if his country were drawn into the war, the State Department said.
Heavier attacks on Gaza
Overnight, Israeli fighter jets struck a “large number of Hamas terror targets throughout” Gaza including command centres and combat positions inside multi-storey buildings, the military said in a statement.
Gaza’s Health Ministry and Hamas media said Israeli aircraft targeted several family houses across Gaza, killing at least 50 people and injuring dozens.
Hamas said it fired rockets towards Israeli’s biggest city Tel Aviv on Saturday in response to those deaths. The Israeli military reported a fresh salvo of rockets from Gaza against southern Israeli border communities before dawn.
A senior Israeli military official who declined to be named said Israel had killed “a few thousand” Hamas militants in the war. “It is not enough. We need to take more … We are looking at a long campaign. They are already hurting, but there is still some way to go,” he said.
He said the air force had targeted some militants in their own homes, including overnight, and acknowledged civilians living nearby might have been hurt.
The significant escalation is the latest boiling point in a long-standing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Hamas is a Palestinian military and political group, gaining power in the Gaza Strip since winning legislative elections there in 2006.
Hamas’s stated aim is to establish a Palestinian state, while refusing to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Hamas, in its entirety, is designated as a terrorist organisation by countries including Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.
Some countries list only its military wing as a terrorist group.
Other countries voted against a UN resolution condemning Hamas in its entirety, as a terrorist organisation.
