More aid to be sent from Cyprus to Gaza as sea route gains acceptance, minister says

An aid ship sails amid a test to launch a new sea route from a port in Cyprus to deliver aid to residents in Gaza Strip. PHOTO: REUTERS

NICOSIA – A second shipment of aid will be sent from Cyprus to Gaza in the coming days, the Cypriot foreign minister said on March 13, citing growing acceptance that the island could play a pivotal role in delivering supplies by sea to the shattered Palestinian enclave.

A ship carrying almost 200 tonnes of food aid for Gaza left Cyprus on March 12, launching a new but untested maritime route to get emergency supplies to a population humanitarian agencies say is at risk of starvation after five months of war.

A new shipment is in the pipeline, Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said.

Cyprus, the closest European Union member state to the Middle East, had campaigned for months to win acceptance of its plan to establish a maritime corridor straight to Gaza, given serious obstacles to getting aid in by land.

“The whole point is to try to offer much needed assistance to the people who are in this horrible situation,” Dr Kombos said. “You can’t do it alone. We need a coalition of willing participants, and that has matured in the last two to three weeks to a point where it has taken on a very rapid pace.”

Further steps on coordinating seaborne aid would be addressed in a conference call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, his British counterpart David Cameron, United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, and a representative of the European Commission, Dr Kombos said.

Mostly funded by the UAE, food collected by charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) was slowly making its way across the Mediterranean on March 13 on a barge towed by Open Arms, a salvage vessel belonging to Spanish charity Proactiva Open Arms.

‘Confident’

The timing of its arrival in Gaza remains unclear. WCK, which has been on the ground for months, has had workers scrambling to create a hard-packed rubble-and-earth wharf on Gaza’s coast to allow the vessel to approach.

“We are confident that when the aid gets to Gaza, there will be a way to offload it and get it into the hands of Gazans who are starving and need this food aid urgently,” said Ms Linda Roth, chief communications officer at WCK.

She was speaking at a warehouse on the outskirts of Larnaca, Cyprus, where aid workers were packing tinned food onto pallets.

The objective, Ms Roth said, was to create a “maritime highway”.

Dr Kombos, who spoke in Nicosia, said the next dispatch would be a bigger cargo. “It will be a mothership which has a higher carriage capacity,” he added.

Cyprus says cargoes for Gaza can undergo security inspections on the island by teams that include Israel, eliminating the need for screenings at their offloading points to eliminate potential hold-ups in aid deliveries.

The United States is pressing Israel to allow greater overland access to the enclave for aid operations. Israel invaded Gaza after militant group Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct 7 and has maintained a tight siege since then.

Israel denies restricting humanitarian aid and says poor United Nations management of distribution is to blame for shortfalls.

The US has begun airdropping aid into Gaza, but humanitarian groups say air drops are more expensive and limited in capacity than deliveries by lorry. REUTERS

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