The humanitarian situation in Gaza has caused horror: aid is being sent from Cyprus

A US charity said it was loading humanitarian aid onto a ship in Cyprus, the first to be sent to Gaza through a maritime corridor that the European Commission hopes will open on Sunday.

According to The Guardian, meanwhile, according to a statement by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad published on Saturday, efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas continue.

Mossad chief David Barnea met Friday with his American counterpart, CIA Director William Burns, to push forward a deal to free the hostages, a Mossad statement released by Netanyahu’s office said. “Contacts and cooperation with mediators are ongoing in an attempt to reduce gaps and reach agreements,” the statement said.

An Israeli strike killed a family of five and wounded nine others in a village in southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, Lebanese security sources said on Saturday.

In Gaza, the strike damaged one of the largest residential towers in Rafah, increasing pressure on the last area of ​​the territory where there has not yet been any fighting on the ground and where more than a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, The Guardian writes.

Dozens of families were left homeless, although there were no reports of casualties when the 12-story building, located 500 meters from the Egyptian border, was hit, local residents said. One of the 300 residents of the high-rise building told reporters that Israel gave them 30 minutes’ notice to leave the building at night.

“People were scared, they were running down the stairs, some were falling, it was chaos. People left behind their belongings and money,” said Mohammad Al-Nabris, adding that among those who tripped on the stairs during the panic evacuation was his friend’s pregnant wife.

A Rafah-based official of the Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in the occupied West Bank, fears the Rafah Tower strike was a sign of an imminent Israeli invasion.

Five months after Israel’s relentless air and ground assault on Gaza, health authorities say nearly 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 72,500 injured and thousands trapped under rubble, The Guardian notes.

The offensive plunged the Palestinian territory, already suffering under a 17-year Israeli blockade, into a humanitarian catastrophe. Much of it was reduced to rubble and most of the 2.3 million people were displaced and the UN warned of disease and famine.

Three Palestinian children died of dehydration and malnutrition at the northern al-Shifa hospital overnight, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Kidra said. Kidra said this brought to 23 the number of Palestinians who have died from similar causes in nearly 10 days.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said last week that the attack on Rafah would continue despite widespread international calls for a ceasefire and strong opposition even from the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally.

Rafah is a key logistics hub for the delivery of humanitarian aid, and any fighting there would disrupt even the meager aid supplies currently flowing into Gaza, as well as lead to widespread civilian casualties, The Guardian stresses.

It is unclear how much the planned maritime corridor will ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Spanish-flagged Open Arms vessel docked three weeks ago at the port of Larnaca in Cyprus, the closest European Union country.

“World Central Kitchen teams in Cyprus load pallets of humanitarian aid onto a ship bound for northern Gaza,” the charity said in a statement.

“We have been preparing for weeks with our trusted NGO partner Open Arms to open a maritime aid corridor that would allow us to expand our efforts in the region,” it said.

The charity said it plans to tow a barge loaded with provisions for residents of Gaza, where dire humanitarian conditions in the more than five-month war between Israel and Hamas have forced some countries to airdrop food and other aid.

“Efforts to establish a humanitarian sea corridor in Gaza are progressing and our tug is ready to depart at a moment’s notice, loaded with tons of food, water and vital supplies for Palestinian civilians,” Open Arms said in a post on social media platform X.

In Larnaca, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, had earlier expressed hope that the sea corridor could open this Sunday, although details of the operation remained unclear. She said a “pilot operation” would be launched on Friday with assistance from the United Arab Emirates, which had provided “the first of many supplies of goods to the people of Gaza.”

Gaza has no functioning ports, and officials have not said where the initial supplies will go, whether they will be subject to Israeli inspection or who will distribute the aid.

The Pentagon said on Friday that the US plan to establish a “temporary maritime pier” in the Gaza Strip would take up to 60 days and would likely involve more than 1,000 US troops. On Sunday, the US announced that the ship – the General Frank S. Besson – had departed from a base in Virginia en route to the Eastern Mediterranean to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea.

In a statement, US Central Command said the logistics ship Besson sailed “less than 36 hours after President Biden announced that the United States would provide humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea,” adding that it was “carrying the first equipment to create a temporary berth for the delivery of vital humanitarian supplies.”

The Gaza war was sparked by an unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel responded with a ruthless military offensive that, according to Gaza’s Hamas-led health ministry, killed at least 30,878 people, most of them women and children, The Guardian recalls.

Israel, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but retained control of its airspace and the strip’s territorial waters, said it “welcomes” the planned maritime corridor.