While the Open Arms sails to Gaza with 200 tons of food, a second shipment is being prepared in Cyprus to leave in the coming days, as confirmed to the Efe agency by sources from World Central Kitchen (WCK), the NGO founded by the Spanish chef. Jose Andres. “We hope to set sail within a few days,” reported a WCK spokeswoman. “Today, March 13, World Central Kitchen is preparing pallets of humanitarian aid in Larnaca, Cyprus, for a second shipment of food to Gaza,” she said. Among the products being packaged are beans, carrots, canned tuna and chickpeas, a total of 400 tons distributed on one hundred pallets. WCK claims to have a total of 500 tonnes ready to be shipped on future ships.
This second shipment would be carried by a ship that has been in Larnaca since last Saturday chartered by the United Arab Emirates. The Emirates have co-financed the WCK operation and also maintain very good relations with Israel.
Linda Roth, from the WCK press team, told Efe that this new shipment is still a private initiative of the NGO, and is not part of the humanitarian aid corridor announced last Friday by the European Commission. The cargo will be unloaded on a 35-meter jetty that is being built by WCK and a Gazan contractor in territory controlled by the Israeli army, and will then be distributed to the 60 kitchens that the NGO maintains in Gaza.
At the same time, the Israeli Government and army are beginning to open their hand to allow trucks to enter Gaza again.
On Tuesday night, a World Food Program (WFP) convoy entered northern Gaza using an Israeli military road and crossing an unreported crossing. It was carrying 88 tons of food for some 25,000 people in Gaza City. In the north of the strip, 27 people (23 of them children) have died of hunger and dehydration in recent days, and some 300,000 people lack food and water. According to the United Nations, 576,000 people are on the brink of hunger in Gaza, where there is nothing left to buy. Shaza Moghraby, WFP spokesperson, said the arrival of his convoy shows that “carrying food by road is possible.” And he added: “We need direct entry points from the north” of the strip.
In fact, there was another entry on the same Tuesday, in a convoy that crossed the Kerem Shalom pass, the one historically used for truck access in the strip. It was a shipment sent by plane through Morocco (a country now in good relations with Israel), transferred to the pass and picked up there by the Palestinian Red Crescent. The National Security Advisor of the United States, Jake Sullivan, said that his country is working “with the Israelis to increase the sending of humanitarian aid by land, through Kerem Shalom and through the new crossing through which trucks passed for the first time on Tuesday”.
Last week, the BBC reported, the PAM tried to bring supplies through the north of the strip, but turned around when it did not coincide with the time agreed with the Israeli army. On February 20, the PAM suspended activities in the north when the first convoy that arrived in three weeks suffered a shooting and was surrounded by a crowd. Nine days later, a hundred Gazans died in a riot in front of a convoy in Gaza City, most of them shot by the Israeli army.
The option of dropping supplies by parachute, practiced by the US, Jordan, Egypt, France and Belgium, has proven inefficient, hence the recourse to trucks. However, Germany announced on Tuesday that its air force was joining this practice.
