Aid convoys finally arrive in northern Gaza
A day after a planned swap of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages was delayed over claims by Hamas that Israel was blocking aid from reaching the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said Sunday that 100 trucks of food, water, emergency medical supplies, medications, and other items had arrived there.
The head of Egypt’s state information service, Diaa Rashwan, said in a statement Sunday that the aid convoy included two trucks loaded with fuel and two carrying cooking gas.
Another Egyptian official said Israeli forces had blocked aid trucks from heading north Saturday until mediators from Egypt and Qatar, who had helped broker the deal, intervened, but that neither Egypt nor Hamas reported obstacles to the aid Sunday.
The Israeli military said on social media that 200 aid trucks had entered Gaza on Sunday.
Combined with the 61 trucks’ worth of aid that reached northern Gaza Saturday, it was the first significant help to arrive there since the war began on Oct. 7 after Hamas’s deadly incursion into Israel. The Israeli ground invasion that followed cut Gaza’s north off from the south and gradually forced hospitals out of service, leaving hundreds of thousands of people desperate for food, drinking water, fuel, and medical care.
Government ministries, the United Nations, aid groups, and families alike largely lost contact with colleagues and relatives in the north, making it difficult to assess the depth of need there. But until the pause in fighting, the furious combat on the ground prevented delivery of aid to the north, where residents and aid workers said far more supplies were needed.
Spotty communications also obscured how many people remained in the north after three weeks of Israeli forces’ pushing for residents to evacuate to the south. While the United Nations said it had counted about 250,000 people who had left, Israeli and Palestinian estimates of those remaining differed, scrambling UN calculations about how much aid to devote to the north.
The information that has trickled out of northern Gaza points to a grim struggle for survival.
“My biggest concern, as a humanitarian organization, is whatever population is there — because even 200,000 is a lot of people — without food, without water, without medicine,” said Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Gaza and the West Bank. “If you don’t do something, we will discover, whenever we’re able to go back there, a disaster.”
An extra complication, he added, was that aid groups were unlikely to be able to deliver help to the north after the temporary truce ended, making action all the more urgent.
Reports by his office said that people in the north were eating unripe fruit and the few raw vegetables that remained, that they could not find bread, that livestock was dying for lack of feed and that crops were increasingly being abandoned for lack of fuel to pump irrigation water. In scattered interviews before the truce took hold, people said they were burning cardboard to cook what little food they had left and filtering nonpotable water through clothing in an attempt to clean it.
Some desperate people broke into UN offices and supermarkets and bakeries seeking food, according to residents and the agency’s reports.
Yahya al-Sarraj, the head of the municipal government in Gaza City in the north, pleaded Sunday for more fuel, saying that it was vital to operate water and sewage infrastructure, to clear roads of debris so rescue teams and paramedics could move around and to remove garbage.
The city has become a stinking graveyard, he said in a phone interview, with thousands of bodies trapped under rubble, sewage flooding onto the beach, and 35,000 tons of trash piling up in the streets.
He estimated that Israeli airstrikes had leveled 60 percent of the city’s buildings, including a well-known cultural center, hotels, beach cafes, resorts, shops, the city government archive, the home of Gaza’s legislative council, and even the zoo, where he said a number of animals had been killed.
The city “was destroyed without mercy,” al-Sarraj said.