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24-05-2025
GAZA STRIP: More than 90 lorry loads of humanitarian aid have been collected by UN teams inside the Gaza Strip, three days after Israel eased an 11-week-long blockade.
The aid, which included flour, baby food and medical equipment, was picked up from the Kerem Shalom crossing on Wednesday night and taken to warehouses for distribution. Several bakeries began producing bread with the flour on Thursday.
The UN said the delays were due to a lack of security along the single access route approved by Israel’s military.
Israeli authorities said they allowed an additional 100 lorry loads through Kerem Shalom on Wednesday. However, the UN said it was “nowhere near enough to meet the vast needs in Gaza”.
About 500 Lorries entered the territory on average every day before the war, the UN has said.
Humanitarian organizations have warned of acute levels of hunger among the 2.1 million population, amid significant shortages of basic foods and skyrocketing prices.
Palestinian Authority Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan, who is based in the occupied West Bank, told reporters on Thursday that 29 children and elderly people had died from “starvation-related” causes in the last couple of days, according to media.
Half a million people face starvation in the coming months, an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has said.
A UN World Food Program (WFP) official said the UN and its partners had over 140,000 tonnes of food, about 6,000 lorry loads and enough to feed the entire population for two months, in position at aid corridors and ready to be brought into Gaza at scale.
Israel stopped all deliveries of aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on 2 March and resumed its military offensive two weeks later, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. It said the steps were meant to put pressure on the armed group to release the 58 hostages still held in Gaza, up to 23 of whom are believed to be alive.
Israel has insisted that there has been no shortage of aid and has accused Hamas of stealing supplies to give to its fighters or sell to raise money, an allegation the group denied. The UN also denied that aid had been diverted.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated the claim on Thursday, saying in a statement; “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer; when mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.”
Netanyahu said the leaders of France, Canada and the UK had “bought into Hamas’s propaganda that says Israel is starving Palestinian children”.
He reiterated that Israel and the US would set up their own aid delivery to be done through American companies in Gaza, bypassing the UN and other aid suppliers.
Netanyahu had previously said he was allowing in a limited amount of food so that the Israeli military could continue its newly expanded ground offensive and take full control of the Palestinian territory.
He said on Thursday that construction of the first distribution zones in the scheme would be completed “in the coming days”.
The UN and other agencies have said they will not co-operate with US-Israeli plan, saying it contradicts fundamental humanitarian principles and appears to “weaponized aid”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had brought in one lorry load of medical supplies for the Red Cross field hospital in the southern city of Rafah but that more was needed. (Int’l News Desk)
