Palestinians in Gaza are still desperately waiting for the food aid to arrive despite mounting pressure on the Israeli government to ease its military offensive and allow more humanitarian supplies into the territory.
The Israeli military continued its renewed attack on Gaza overnight on Tuesday, killing at least 82, including a week-old baby and several women, Gaza’s hospital officials said.
The ongoing attacks come despite international and domestic pressure to allow essential humanitarian aid to flow to the two million-plus Palestinians in Gaza on the brink of a famine after an 11-week blockade.
According to Israeli military figures, fewer than 100 aid trucks have entered Gaza since Monday, when prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government agreed to lift the blockade, and on Wednesday morning several Israeli activists attempted to block trucks carrying supplies from entering Gaza.
So far, supplies have not made it to Gaza’s soup kitchens, bakeries, markets and hospitals, according to aid officials and local bakeries that were standing by to receive supplies of flour.
“None of this aid – that is a very limited number of trucks – has reached the Gaza population,” said Antoine Renard, country director of the UN’s World Food Programme.
He said the trucks seemed to be stuck in Kerem Shalom, the sprawling logistics hub in Israel near the southeastern corner of the Gaza Strip.
“There is no flour, no food, no water,” said Sabah Warsh Agha, a 67-year-old woman from the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya sheltering in a cluster of tents near the beach in Gaza City. “We used to get water from the pump, now the pump has stopped working. There is no diesel or gas.”
Pope Leo XIV used his first Wednesday general audience in St Peter’s Square to appeal to Israel to allow more aid to enter Gaza.
“The situation in the Gaza Strip is increasingly worrying and painful,” the Pope said.
“I renew my heartfelt appeal to allow the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to put an end to the hostilities, the heart-rending price of which is being paid by children, the elderly and the sick.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced criticism this week from within the country, after opposition leader Yair Golan and former prime minister Ehud Olmert separately called out the actions of the Israeli government.
Golan said in an interview on Tuesday that “a sane country doesn’t kill babies as a hobby”, while Olmert said in an interview with BBC that what Israel was doing in Gaza was “very close to a war crime”.
Netanyahu hit back at both figures in a video on Wednesday, saying their comments were “shocking”.
“While IDF soldiers are fighting Hamas, there are those who are strengthening the false propaganda against the State of Israel,” he said.
On Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu told the first press conference he has held in several months that all of the Gaza Strip would come under Israeli security control “in the end”.
He also claimed that Israel had probably killed Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar after a strike on a hospital in southern Gaza earlier this month, and added that if there is an opportunity for a temporary ceasefire and hostage deal, “Israel will be open to it”.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) said it struck more than 115 terror targets in Gaza throughout Tuesday evening and into the morning, killing a member of Hamas’s elite military branch, Mohammad Shahin.
The IDF has also said it “regrets the inconvenience caused” after video emerged of troops firing warning shots at dozens of foreign diplomats who were touring the Jenin camp on Wednesday, forcing the diplomats to run for safety.
The military said the diplomats had “deviated from the route and entered an area where they were not authorised to be”, but the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has called for a full investigation into the incident, saying any threat to diplomats’ lives was “unacceptable”.
Jenin has been the site of Israel’s widespread crackdown against West Bank militants since earlier this year.
Additional reporting from AP and Reuters
