81 trucks of aid entered Gaza Friday; UN calls volume ‘woefully inadequate’

Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief

Israeli soldiers check an Egyptian truck carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip, at the Kerem Shalom Crossing in southern Israel Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Israeli soldiers check an Egyptian truck carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip, at the Kerem Shalom Crossing in southern Israel Friday, Dec. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Eighty-one trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom and Egypt’s Rafah crossings today, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.

Kerem Shalom had been closed for three days until today due to what OCHA says were security incidents, including an IDF drone strike, the seizure of aid by desperate locals and unannounced and uncoordinated prisoner and casualty transfers from Israel.

“The volume of aid remains woefully inadequate,” OCHA says in a statement. “The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator ‘that this is an impossible situation for the people of Gaza and for those trying to help them. The fighting must stop.'”

Israel maintains that it is inspecting hundreds of trucks every day and that the reason for the bottleneck is the failure of UN facilitators to keep up with the pace. The UN has argued that mass aid delivery is impossible amid the IDF’s aerial and ground operations in Gaza.

Israel reopened its Kerem Shalom Crossing on December 17 for aid to enter Gaza directly from Israel for the first time since the war’s outbreak.

However, the move hasn’t led to the desired increase in aid delivery.

Two hundred trucks entered Gaza each day of last month’s week-long truce. The daily figure has not come close to that number since. Before the war and the massive humanitarian crisis that it has sparked, roughly 500 trucks of aid were entering Gaza each day.

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