First trucks carrying medical supplies, food enter Gaza after Egypt’s Rafah border opens

CAIRO - Trucks carrying aid arrived in southern Gaza on Saturday, the first convoy of humanitarian supplies since Israel began a devastating siege, hours after further heavy Israeli bombardment overnight that killed dozens of Palestinians.

The United Nations said the 20-truck convoy included life-saving supplies that would be received by the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, said the delivery included medicine and a limited amount of food, such as canned goods.

Hamas’ media office said the truckloads of aid “will not change the catastrophic medical conditions in Gaza”.

Rafah is the main route in and out of the Gaza Strip not controlled by Israel, which agreed to allow aid in from Egypt following a request from its top ally, the United States.

US President Joe Biden said agreement had been reached for 20 aid trucks to cross through Rafah, and added on Friday that he believed those first trucks would pass through within 48 hours.

The trucks exited the Rafah crossing and arrived in southern Gaza, including major town Khan Younis, a Palestinian border official said, after days of diplomatic wrangling over conditions for delivering the relief.

The supplies are just a small fraction of what is required in Gaza, where Israel’s “total siege” has left the enclave’s 2.3 million people running out of food, water, medicine and fuel in what the United Nations says is a budding humanitarian catastrophe.

UN officials say at least 100 trucks a day are required in Gaza to cover urgent needs, and that any delivery of aid has to be sustained and at scale.

Before the outbreak of conflict, an average of 450 aid trucks were arriving there daily.

The relief supplies “constitute only 3 per cent of what was entering the Gaza Strip daily in terms of health and humanitarian needs before the aggression”, a statement from the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

The ministry said the lack of fuel was jeopardising the lives of patients, including people injured by air strikes, with 14 medical centres already suspending operations for want of fuel.

Addressing a peace summit in Cairo, UN chief Antonio Guterres pleaded on Saturday for a “humanitarian ceasefire” in the war between Israel and Hamas, demanding global “action to end this godawful nightmare”.

Israel imposed a total blockade and launched air strikes on Gaza in response to a deadly attack on Israeli soil by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Oct 7.

Continued bombardment

Israel kept up heavy bombardment of targets throughout Gaza overnight on Saturday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “fight until victory” following the release of the first two hostages by Hamas.

Hamas on Friday freed Americans Judith Tai Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, who were among about 210 people kidnapped in its cross-border attack on southern Israel. Hamas said it acted in part “for humanitarian reasons” in response to Qatari mediation.

Hamas gunmen seized the hostages when they burst out of the blockaded enclave into Israel and killed 1,400 people, mainly civilians, in a shock rampage, the deadliest single attack on Israelis since the country’s founding 75 years ago.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israel’s retaliatory air and missile strikes have killed at least 4,385 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while more than a million people have been displaced.

Israel has amassed tanks and troops near the fenced border around the small coastal enclave for a planned ground invasion with the objective of annihilating Hamas, after several inconclusive wars dating to its seizure of power there in 2007.

Overnight, Israeli fighter jets struck a large number of Hamas terror targets throughout Gaza, including command centres and combat positions inside multi-storey buildings, the Israeli military said in a statement.

Palestinian medical officials and Hamas media said Israeli aircraft had overnight targeted family houses across Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated places, killing at least 50 people and injuring dozens.

Hamas said it fired rockets towards Israel’s biggest city, Tel Aviv, on Saturday in response to Israel’s killing of civilians overnight.

The Israeli military reported a fresh salvo of rockets from Gaza against southern Israeli border communities before dawn, then a lull until sirens sounded in the port city of Ashdod, some 40km north of Gaza. There was no immediate word of any casualties.

The UN has warned of “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, where food has been running out and supplies of fuel needed to keep hospital back-up generators running have reached dangerously low levels.

Israel has said it will not allow aid to enter from its territory until Hamas releases the hostages it took during its attack, but aid can enter through Egypt as long as it does not end up in the hands of Hamas.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that aid entering Gaza would not include fuel and would go to southern areas of the enclave, where Israel has urged civilians to congregate.

Terrified Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes after Israel’s deadly overnight bombings lashed out at reports of aid trucks about to enter Gaza, saying it was a ceasefire and not food that was needed.

“They were asleep when the missile was dropped on them – innocent children, their father, their grandfather. What did they do? Did they fire rockets? Carried bullets? They are innocent children who did nothing!” cried one tearful woman.

“We have been fighting, and the Arab nations are just watching. Canned food, is that the price of the Palestinian people who are offering sacrifices everywhere?”

Cairo summit

Diplomacy to secure a ceasefire has been fruitless so far.

Egypt opened a summit on the Gaza crisis on Saturday to try to head off a wider regional war, but assembled Middle Eastern and European leaders struggled to agree on a common position on the Israel-Hamas conflagration.

Arab leaders at the Cairo Peace Summit condemned Israel’s two-week-old bombardment of Gaza and demanded renewed efforts to reach a Middle East peace settlement to end a decades-long cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Palestinians would not be displaced or driven off their land.

“We won’t leave, we won’t leave,” he told the summit.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II denounced what he termed global silence about Israel’s attacks, and urged an even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The message the Arab world is hearing is that Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones,” he said, adding that forced displacement “is a war crime according to international law, and a red line for all of us”.

The US, a vital player in all past efforts towards peace in the region, sent only the charge d’affaires of its embassy in Cairo.

Israel was absent from the meeting, as were several major Western leaders, cooling expectations for what the hastily convened event can achieve.

Israel has already told all civilians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which includes Gaza City. Many people have yet to leave, saying they fear losing everything and have nowhere safe to go, with southern areas also under attack.

The UN humanitarian affairs office said more than 140,000 homes – nearly a third of all homes in Gaza – had been damaged, with nearly 13,000 completely destroyed. REUTERS