The Israel announced today that it will allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip from Egyptwhile imposing a strict siege on the Palestinian enclave that has been hammered relentlessly since the bloody attack by Hamas on October 7.
“Israel will not block humanitarian aid from Egypt when it comes to food, water and medicine for civilians in the southern Gaza Strip“, says the statement issued by the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Any supply that reaches Hamas will be neutralized.”
“A positive development, which we have been asking for since the beginning of the conflict“, the head of the Egyptian diplomacy, Sameh Shoukry, said today in an interview with the Saudi Al-Arabiya television network.
However, the transfer of aid “requires organization”, stressed Soukry. He explained to the Cairo-based Al-Ghad network that “the road that allowed aid to be transported between Gaza and the Rafah crossing was destroyed,” following Israeli shelling on the Palestinian side of the border.
In Egypt’s Sinai, aid trucks have been stuck for days in the area around the terminal, which is still closed, according to eyewitnesses.
100 trucks are needed daily
The delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza — once it crosses the border between Egypt and the Palestinian enclave — should be “systematic,” on the order of 100 trucks a day, and safe, Martin Griffiths, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator, told CNN today. humanitarian affairs.
“We need to start with a significant number of trucks and reach 100 trucks a day, as was the case in the past with the aid program in Gaza,” Griffiths explained.
He spoke of “incredibly detailed negotiations with the parties involved» to determine the terms of entry and distribution of aid.
Griffiths’ remarks came hours after US President Joe Biden said he had received assurances from the Israeli government on how to allow this humanitarian aid to pass through the Rafah crossing.
“We need to be able to be confident that we can intervene at scale every day, purposefully, repeatably and reliablyGriffiths insisted, explaining that the various UN staff in the Gaza Strip – including 14,000 UNRWA staff – would then be able to distribute it.
“Second, we need to be able to reach people safely,” Griffiths insisted, recalling that international humanitarian law requires humanitarian organizations to provide aid where people feel safe.
“These two things need to be clarified, confirmed and I hope that will take place in the next few days so that we can start this basic relief programme,” explained Martin Griffiths, who has been in Cairo since yesterday, Tuesday, for negotiations with the Egyptian authorities.
For days, tons of humanitarian aid have been stranded in the Sinai desert as Rafah is closed to the Palestinian side following four bombings this week.
Griffiths stressed that the UN will ensure that aid is delivered exclusively to civilians and not to the Islamist Hamas movement that controls Gaza.
The Gaza Strip is plunged into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. It has been under a near-total blockade by Israel since the October 7 unprecedented attack on its territory by Hamas, whose commandos killed more than 1,400 people and kidnapped nearly 200. The victims are overwhelmingly civilians as well as 3,000 people killed in Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip.
Israel is bombing the small Palestinian enclave of 2.4 million people in preparation for a possible ground attack.
Source: News Beast
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