UN says aid delivery into Gaza via Egypt should take place ‘in next day or so’
International body says it’s in ‘deep and advanced negotiations with all relevant sides’ for aid to be taken across Rafah border crossing and into Strip
The initial aid delivery into the Gaza Strip via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt should take place “in the next day or so,” the United Nations said Friday.
“We are in deep and advanced negotiations with all relevant sides to ensure that an aid operation in Gaza starts as quickly as possible… a first delivery is due to start in the next day or so,” the UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said, quoted by his spokesman Jens Laerke in Geneva.
Laerke told reporters: “I do not have an exact time for when these movements will take place, of course, with the hope that they can begin as soon as possible, in a way that is safe, secure and hopefully sustained.
“We need to have the mechanism in place whereby this can be driven into southern Gaza. That does not take away from our call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
With Israel still reeling from the bloodiest terror attack in its history, and declaredly seeking to destroy the Gaza-governing Hamas terror group that carried it out, international aid has piled up in Egypt near Gaza, with many Palestinians in dire need of food and water as the Israeli military carries out heavy bombing of terror targets,
Israel has for the past week urged all civilian residents of northern Gaza, some one million people, to evacuate to the center and south of the Strip as it prepares to intensify operations against Hamas in the enclave’s north.
Hundreds of thousands have done so, according to the military, despite Hamas urging them not to leave their homes and in some cases putting up roadblocks.
The UN says the humanitarian situation in the Strip is worsening by the day.
Egyptian state-linked broadcaster Al Qahera News had initially said the Rafah crossing — the only potential route into Gaza — would open on Friday, but Cairo later said it needed more time to repair roads.
War erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw at least 1,500 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,400 people and seizing 200-250 hostages of all ages under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — men, women, children and the elderly.
Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 260 were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists, in what Biden has highlighted as “the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
Israel says it will continue its military campaign until it topples Hamas and is unwilling to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza from its own borders until the hostages are released.
US President Joe Biden has suggested that a major reason for his whirlwind trip was to coax Israel and Egypt to allow the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, as well as allowing foreigners to leave.
After Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet on Wednesday, Jerusalem announced that it had agreed not to block the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt.
Israel says its Gaza offensive is aimed at destroying Hamas’s infrastructure, and has vowed to eliminate the entire terror group, which rules the Strip. It says it is targeting all areas where Hamas operates, while seeking to minimize civilian casualties.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says that more than 3,785 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died in the strikes. The figures issued by the terror group cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include its own terrorists and gunmen, and the victims of a blast at a Gaza City hospital on October 17 caused by an Islamic Jihad missile misfire that Hamas has falsely blamed on Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.