Palestinian Territories – The United States plans gathered pace on Friday to get aid by sea into Gaza, where the UN has repeatedly warned of famine and Israel has been accused of limiting aid as it battles Hamas members.
In his annual State of the Union address to Congress, President Joe Biden said the US military would “lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water medicine and temporary shelters.”
Senior administration officials said this effort builds on an initiative proposed by Cyprus for a maritime aid corridor. In the Cypriot port of Larnaca on Friday, European Union chief Ursula Von der Leyen expressed hope the corridor could open this Sunday.
The United States and other countries have already been parachuting food and other assistance into Gaza but air or sea delivery is not the best way, said Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations aid coordinator for the Palestinian territory.
“The diversification of the supply routes via land” remains the optimal solution, Kaag said.
Biden, whose administration has been increasingly vocal about the war’s consequences for civilians, delivered some of his strongest comments yet, as hopes dimmed for a new truce before Ramadan, the Muslim holy month which could begin Sunday depending on the lunar calendar.
“To the leadership of Israel I say this — humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” said Biden, whose country provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.
Trucks queueing –
The war in Gaza began after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in about 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to Israeli figures.
Israel has responded with a relentless bombardment, alongside a ground offensive, that the health ministry in Gaza said has killed at least 30,878 people, mostly women and children.
It said the latest toll includes 78 fatalities over the previous 24 hours.
US officials said a “number of weeks” would be required before aid deliveries to the planned port could begin, but they said the administration would not “be waiting on the Israelis”.
The temporary port will feature a pier that will “provide the capacity for hundreds of additional truckloads of assistance each day”, a senior Biden administration official said.
The United Nations has cited “access constraints” as among the factors limiting essential water and other services.
The situation is particularly acute in Gaza’s north, where residents have been forced to eat animal fodder and even leaves.
Veteran aid worker Jean-Pierre Delomier, who responded to disasters worldwide for decades, said the war in Gaza is by far “the worst”.
“I saw kilometers (miles) of trucks queueing on four lanes, all waiting to get into Gaza” from Egypt, Delomier, 61, told AFP in France after eight days in Gaza for Handicap International – Humanity & Inclusion (HI).
“Planes fly over to drop a few pallets, whereas just behind (the border) there are kilometers of pallets waiting that could just be let in,” he said.
Desperate Gazans have swarmed the aid trucks which do make it in to the territory.
A bloodied shroud –
On February 29, in one such incident in north Gaza, more than 100 people were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on crowds scrambling for food aid from a convoy, according to the health ministry.
A UN report said February saw a 50 percent increase in coordinated aid missions facilitated by Israel across Gaza, though few were in the north.
Manal Draymali, 44, a Palestinian woman displaced to Rafah, in Gaza’s far south, said that with firewood scarce, “we scavenge for plastic and other discarded items from trash” to cook.
She and others said they had nothing to celebrate on Friday’s International Women’s Day.
Roughly 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge in Rafah on the Egyptian border but there, too, they are not safe.
At the city’s Al-Najjar hospital, a man held the body of a child shrouded in a white cloth soaked through with blood. The child was among several people killed in strikes that hit a residential area, an AFP correspondent said.
Biden had urged Hamas to accept a ceasefire plan with Israel before Ramadan, but Hamas negotiators left talks with mediators in Egypt to consult with the movement’s leadership in Qatar.
Hamas’s delegation voiced dissatisfaction with Israeli responses so far before leaving Cairo, although US ambassador to Israel Jack Lew denied the talks had “broken down”.
Truce efforts continue –
A Hamas official also said negotiations were not over.
“The mediators informed Hamas that efforts will continue to reach an agreement,” the official told AFP, requesting not to be named as he was not authorized to speak on the matter.
Israeli war cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot said Hamas was under “very serious pressure” from mediators to make a “counter-offer”.
“Then it will be possible to advance it and take a position,” he said.
In their October attack, Hamas members took about 250 Israeli and foreign hostages, some of whom were released during a week-long truce in November. Israel believes 99 hostages remain alive in Gaza and that 31 have died.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced increasing public pressure over the fate of hostages still held, and from anti-government protests.
He has vowed to press on with the campaign to destroy Hamas, before or after any truce deal.
The impact of the war has been felt across the Middle East, including in the Red Sea area vital for world trade where Yemen’s Houthi rebels have repeatedly fired drones and missiles at ships.
The US military said Friday it had conducted another round of “self-defense strikes” against rebel targets in Yemen.
A cynical move, says UN
The US plan for a temporary port off Gaza to bring in aid is a cynical play for a US audience and will not avert mass starvation, a UN rights expert said.
Announcing the initiative in his annual State of the Union address on Thursday, US President Joe Biden pleaded with Israel to let more aid into the blockaded territory.
“A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting in Gaza,” Biden told the US Congress.
But Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, dismissed the measure.
“No-one has asked for a maritime pier — not the Palestinian people, not the humanitarian aid community,” he told a briefing in Geneva.
More than five months into the war in Gaza, the UN has repeatedly argued that only massive and sustained aid delivery over land can help calm the ballooning humanitarian catastrophe.
Neither a pier, nor the increasing airdrops over Gaza would “prevent starvation and famine by any definition”, Fakhri said.
Such methods of aid delivery were normally only used as a last resort to get aid into enemy territory, he added.
That Israel’s main ally is resorting to such a measure “is absurd in a dark, cynical way”, he said.
He suggested the move was likely “a performance to try to meet a domestic audience, with elections around the corner”.
Fakhri is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, but does not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
He accused Israel of mounting an intentional “starvation campaign” in Gaza, where the UN has warned famine is “almost inevitable”.
The war in Gaza began after an unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that resulted in about 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel has responded with a relentless offensive that the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said has killed more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children.
Speaking before the UN rights council on Thursday, Fakhri maintained that “Israeli is not only denying and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza” but also “destroying the food system in” the territory.
He said that Israel since last October had denied all fishers access to the sea and had “destroyed 75 percent of the fishing sector”.
And this, he said, was after Israel already had “been strangling Gaza for 17 years”.
That lenghty blockade has made the impact of the aid-cutoff since October 7 all the more dramatic, Fakhri said.
“We’ve never seen an entire civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely in modern history, and people’s health is rapidly declining.”