The first trucks with humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip this morning from Egypt through the Rafah crossing. After days of intense negotiations between Israel, Egypt and humanitarian organizations, the first vehicles entered shortly after 10 in the morning. At 10:50 (11:50 local time) there were already five trucks that had managed to cross. It is an example of the slowness of the process and the difficulties in inspecting its content, which have been the focus of the discussion in recent days.
The trucks transport medicines and meals. Specifically, canned food, blankets and mattresses. But according to the Red Cross, they do not transport water, as was initially thought. The data corroborates the complaints of humanitarian organizations, which describe these twenty trucks as a “drop of water”, if one considers that before the war, which is now fourteen days old, half a thousand large transport vehicles crossed the Rafah crossing. .
For Western countries, however, the entry has been widely celebrated. “It is an important step,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Martin Griffith, United Nations Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid, has also seen it this way. The secretary general of this organization, António Guterres, had to travel to Egypt on Tuesday to force the end of a negotiation that was taking longer than normal.
The American administration is also satisfied, although privately it admits that this is the only tangible transfer obtained by President Joe Biden in his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas’s media office, for its part, has said that the expected truckloads of aid “will not change the catastrophic medical conditions in Gaza,” as Reuters reports.
Images broadcast by the private Egyptian network ExtraNews show dozens of volunteers applauding and cheering with joy, after days of waiting to access the Palestinian enclave, while Egyptian workers worked to restore the pavement damaged by Israeli bombings, which did not allow access. until now.
Inside the Strip, where there are 2.3 million people, hospitals are running out of medicines while Israel has not stopped bombing the enclave for a single day. There is practically no fuel in Gaza either, another precious commodity in the current circumstances, although Israel has been restrictive in that regard. Tel Aviv keeps all the crossings closed and does not plan to change its position until the more than 200 hostages in the hands of Hamas appear.
Just on Friday night, a mother and daughter of American nationality were released for humanitarian reasons. The opening of the Rafah border crossing occurs on the same day that the New Administrative Capital of Egypt, 50 kilometers southeast of Cairo , hosts an international summit headed by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al Sisi, and in which leaders from around the world participate.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has stated that supplies, including medicines for trauma and chronic diseases and basic essential medicines, will cross today.
The passage of the first trucks has led members of the international community to ask that this action not be an exception, with an Israeli offensive that has left at least 4,137 dead in the Gaza Strip and forced the displacement of 1.4 million of Gazans. The Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, James Cleverly, has said that the aid crossing into Gaza “cannot be isolated” and calls, through the social network X, for greater humanitarian access.
Israel remains faithful to its program, as Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, recalled on Friday night. First, punish Gaza with artillery, especially those places where Hamas targets are suspected (and that may include, as has been seen, hospitals, schools or churches). Then enter by land, probably the most risky of the phases. The Israel Defense Forces have the challenge of advancing street by street, house by house, and neutralizing the vast network of tunnels that Hamas uses to gain mobility and, probably also, to hide the hostages.
The third phase, once the elimination of Hamas has been completed, is the withdrawal, without specifying whether there are plans for the day after. In any case Gallant was clear: “we do not want to interfere in the life” of Gaza.
The number of people who have left their homes in Gaza due to Israeli attacks has now risen to 1.4 million, almost two thirds of the 2.2 million people who inhabit the Palestinian strip, the Coordination Office of United Nations Humanitarian Affairs.
In its daily report on the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories since the outbreak of the conflict on October 7, the coordination office indicates that some 544,000 of these displaced people are taking shelter in shelters run by the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees. (UNRWA).
Israel raised the alert level this Saturday and issued a travel warning so that its citizens do not go to Egypt, Jordan or Morocco due to the risk that they will be the target of attacks in the middle of the war with the Palestinian Islamist militias in Gaza.
In a joint statement from the National Security Council, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israelis in these countries are also asked to leave them “as soon as possible.”
“Due to the continuation of the war, in recent days another significant upsurge in protests against Israel has been detected in several countries, especially in the Arab countries of the Middle East, along with signs of hostility and violence against Israeli and Jewish symbols” , indicates the statement. “The rhetoric of global jihad has become more extreme, requiring harm to Israelis and Jews around the world,” he adds.
On Friday, Israel also ordered the evacuation of a city of 20,000 inhabitants, Kiryat Shmona, a few kilometers from the border with Lebanon. The decision denotes both the importance that Tel Aviv gives to the opening of the northern front and the possibility that the Israel Defense Forces assume that entry into the Gaza Strip will immediately activate the activity of the Hizbullah militiamen.
