More countries join US plan for sea corridor to aid Gaza
Britain, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates will join the United States in opening a maritime route for humanitarian relief to the Gaza Strip, officials said Friday, adding momentum to a complex and untested effort to bring needed aid to the territory by sea.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU executive body, and David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, announced their participation hours after President Joe Biden outlined a U.S. plan to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast to support the shipment of food, water, medicine and other necessities to desperate Palestinian civilians.
Von der Leyen said the first ship carrying aid could depart the EU nation of Cyprus for Gaza as soon as Friday, with more on Sunday.
But it was not clear how or where the vessels would unload their cargo or how it would be distributed amid Israeli bombardment and attacks by hungry Palestinians on aid trucks.
Gaza does not have a functioning port, its coastal waters are too shallow for most vessels, and U.S. officials have said it could take 30 to 60 days to set up the floating pier.
At a news conference in Cyprus, von der Leyen offered few details.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday that it supports a maritime corridor as long as goods are checked “in accordance with Israeli standards” before leaving Cyprus.
Despite the many questions, U.S. and European officials emphasized the urgent need to open new routes for aid into Gaza, where relief agencies say 2.2 million Palestinians are facing extreme hunger amid Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks against Hamas.
In a joint statement, Britain, the EU and the UAE said the maritime corridor must “be part of a sustained effort to increase the flow of humanitarian aid and commercial commodities into Gaza through all possible routes.”
For months, the United States and others have warned that Israel was not allowing sufficient aid by land into Gaza. Those concerns have multiplied in recent days, as Palestinian health officials reported that some children had died of malnutrition and the United Nations warned that more than 570,000 people are facing “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”
Aid officials say sea shipments — and a limited number of airdrops conducted by the United States and other nations — cannot make up for the lack of supply routes by land. Only about 100 relief trucks entered Gaza each day in February, on average, through the two open land routes, a fraction of what was going in before the war began in October.
Israel has insisted on inspecting shipments into Gaza, arguing that they could be diverted by Hamas, but says it does not restrict how much aid gets in.
“We know the difficulties faced at the land borders in Gaza,” von der Leyen told reporters.
Israeli officials have not said whether they would open more land routes into Gaza, as many aid agencies have called for, particularly into northern Gaza where relief deliveries have all but stopped because of insecurity.
Plans for the sea route began taking shape months ago. In November, President Nikos Christodoulides of Cyprus announced an initiative to collect shipments in his country, inspect them at the port of Larnaca and sail them through a secure sea corridor to Gaza, about 240 miles away.
Meanwhile, Biden’s growing frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to mount, with the Democrat captured on a hot mic saying he and the Israeli leader will need to have a “come-to-Jesus meeting.”
The comments by Biden came as he spoke with Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., on the floor of the House chamber after Thursday night’s State of the Union address.