From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Dozens protest aid trucks at Gaza border crossing: ‘Feeding the enemy while they torture our starving hostages’
Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
Dozens of Israelis protest authorities’ approval for aid trucks to cross into the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
The protesters wave Israeli flags in front of the trucks as they chant slogans against “aiding the enemy.”
“This is insane,” one protester, Reut Ben Haim, a mother of eight from Netivot, tells The Times of Israel. “While the people in Israel await a victory, the government is feeding, clothing and fueling the enemy, even as it tries to kill our troops and civilians with rockets and tortures our starving hostages.”
Israel lets in hundreds of tons of goods defined as humanitarian aid that in recent weeks have been dispatched from Egypt into Gaza through Israel, where the goods are inspected by security forces.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes due to the fighting live in tent cities and elsewhere in the southern Gaza Strip in a growing humanitarian crisis. US officials, as well as officials from the EU and the UK, are pressing Israel to let in more humanitarian aid.
