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A day after President Biden announced plans to send aid by sea to the Gaza Strip, European leaders announced on Friday that aid would be delivered by ship as early as the weekend. But aid groups and Gazan officials have criticized air and sea transport as too cumbersome and advocated for more food and medicine to be delivered by truck.
A package of humanitarian aid dropped from an aircraft shocked Palestinians on Friday, killing at least five Palestinians and injuring several others, Gaza authorities said, prompting aid to starving Gaza residents. This highlighted the difficulties in delivering supplies.
Five months of war and Israeli blockade have put hundreds of thousands of Gazans on the brink of starvation, and the United Nations has put forward various proposals to speed up the delivery of food and other critical needs. I warned you that I was encouraging you. Although Israel insists that all goods entering Gaza be inspected, aid trucks are only allowed to enter two of the border crossings in southern Gaza, from Egypt and Israel.
President Biden on Thursday night outlined a U.S. military plan to build a floating pier on the Gaza Strip’s Mediterranean coast to provide food, water, medicine and other necessities to civilians, an operation that would help provide access to the area. “This will enable a significant increase” in
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a Friday news conference that the pier will help provide up to 2 million meals per day. The population of the Gaza Strip is approximately 2.3 million.
But U.S. officials have said the project will take at least 30 to 60 days to complete, raising questions about how starvation in the Gaza Strip can be stemmed at a critical time in the coming days.
Aid group Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement Friday that the U.S. maritime program was a “clear obstruction” and that providing aid was a “political” rather than a logistical issue.
“The food, water and medicine desperately needed by the people of Gaza lies just across the border,” the group said in a statement. “Israel needs to facilitate the flow of goods, not hinder it.”
Britain, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates announced Friday they would join the U.S. maritime effort, but added in a joint statement that aid must be delivered “through all possible routes.”
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, said the first ship carrying aid would soon leave EU member state Cyprus for Gaza and that more would arrive on Sunday. He said the ship may continue.
It was not immediately clear where the ship would unload its cargo or how the cargo would be distributed amid Israeli shelling and attacks on aid trucks by starving Palestinians. Gaza has no functioning port and its coastal waters are shallow enough for most ships to pass.
At a press conference in Cyprus, von der Leyen provided few details. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday that it supports the maritime corridor as long as goods are inspected “in accordance with Israeli standards” before leaving Cyprus.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told reporters on Friday that it was “critically important” that Israel fully open the port of Ashdod in northern Gaza to receive maritime aid.
“It is a functioning port and can accept aid right now,” he said. “That could increase the amount of aid and force them into Gaza.”
Prime Minister Cameron said that in recent years, around 120 aid trucks were entering Israel every day, but the enclave needed more than four times that number.
Israeli authorities have not said whether they will open further land routes to Gaza.
Shortages of food and other supplies are particularly acute in northern Gaza, where humanitarian groups are calling on Israel to reopen its main border crossing. Several attempts to drive goods trucks from the south to the north have had limited success, in some cases being turned back under gunfire, or being swarmed by desperate people and cleanly picked off before the trucks reach their destinations. aid organizations report.
Plans for the sea route began to take shape several months ago. In November, Cypriot President Nicos Christodoulides announced an initiative to collect shipments within the country, inspect them at the port of Larnaca, and send them via safe sea routes to Gaza, some 340 miles away.
Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Retinbiotis said if the first shipment this weekend was successful, more shipments would follow. He said the journey would take about 15 hours, but declined to say where in Gaza the package would be delivered, citing security concerns.
Part of the aid money will be distributed by renowned Spanish chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, which has served more than 32 million meals in Gaza.
Mr. Andres posted the image. Social media On Friday, pallets engraved with the names of his group and the Spanish aid group Open Arms were shown being loaded onto a ship. He said plans for the shipment are in the “final stages” and will “land on the coast of Gaza with 200 pallets.”
The confusion and despair created by war has complicated aid delivery efforts. Last week, an aid convoy with an Israeli military escort ended in disaster, with dozens of Palestinians killed as they swarmed around the aid truck. The Israeli military issued a statement Friday summarizing the findings of an initial internal investigation, saying Israeli soldiers “fired accurately” at Gazans as they approached during a chaotic scene near the convoy.
This account differed greatly from that of witnesses and Palestinian officials who described heavy gunfire after thousands of desperate Gaza residents approached an aid delivery.
The Israeli military said an investigation found that the soldiers fired in an attempt to distance the “suspects.”
“As they continued to approach, troops opened fire to eliminate the threat,” the statement said.
The release of the report comes as Gaza authorities reveal details of what they say is another aid delivery disaster: the death of a Palestinian in an airdrop on Friday. The region’s Hamas-run government media office said in a statement that the aid “fell on the heads” of some people “as a result of an erroneous landing.”
The report could not be immediately verified by independent sources.
A video circulating on social media purporting to depict the incident shows a plane lowering a parachute loaded with aid over northern Gaza.in clipThe New York Times confirmed the date and location of the crash, and it appears one parachute failed to open, causing multiple packages not attached to the parachute to fall to the ground. In the recorded clip, Near al-Shati campI see people running in different directions.
Jamie McGoldrick, a senior U.N. relief official, said the incident was further evidence that Israel needed to open more land routes for aid.
“Just let things flow. It’s a very simple solution,” he said in an interview. “We don’t need airdrops like the one that killed five people in the north this morning.”
It remains unclear which country ended the aid package, but a military spokesperson said it was not the United States. In recent weeks, the United States, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and France have conducted airdrops.
“Reports that the U.S. airdrop resulted in casualties among civilians on the ground are false, as we have confirmed that all supplies landed safely,” Pentagon spokesman General Patrick Ryder said in a statement. Stated.
Translator Saleh Eid, 60, said in a phone interview on Friday that he had previously seen air-dropped packages in northern Gaza fall “very quickly” without the parachutes opening, posing a danger to people’s lives. He said he saw it.
Eid, who lives in Jabaliya, just north of Gaza City, said many of these shipments ended up in the sea. Some fell into open fields near the border with Israel, and people risked being shot by Israeli forces to retrieve them, he said.
Eid said much of the airdropped food ends up being sold on the black market rather than being distributed to the hungriest.
He said he bought three bags of food at the market on Sunday, flown in from the United States. He gave her food to his wife, who was nursing her two-week-old baby, in the hope that she would be able to eat enough to produce milk.
He said each bag cost 30 shekels, or about $8, and contained a small meal, biscuits, jam, peanut butter, a chocolate bar, a juice box, instant coffee and gum.
helen cooper, victoria kim and Christina Morales Contributed to the report.
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