TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Egypt said Friday it had agreed to send U.N. humanitarian aid trucks through Israel’s main crossing point into Gaza, but it remains unclear whether they will be able to enter the territory while fighting rages in the south. city of Rafah amid Israel’s growing offensive there.
Furthermore, the bodies of three other hostages killed on October 7 were found overnight in Gaza, the Israeli army announced on Friday. The head of the CIA met in Paris with Israeli and Qatari officials, trying to relaunch negotiations for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened as the UN and other aid agencies say the entry of food and other supplies has fallen dramatically since the start of the Israeli offensive on Rafah ago more than two weeks. On Friday, the highest court of the UN – the International Court of Justice – ordered Israel to end the Rafah offensivealthough Israel is unlikely to comply.
At the heart of the problem are the two main crossing points through which around 300 aid trucks arrived in Gaza each day before the offensive began.
Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has since been inoperative. The nearby Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza has remained open, and Israel says it sends hundreds of trucks there every day. But even if commercial trucks managed to cross the border, the UN says they cannot reach Kerem Shalom to collect aid when it arrives, because fighting in the area makes it too dangerous.
As a result, the UN says it has received only 143 trucks from the crossing over the past 19 days. Hundreds of trucks remained stuck on the Gaza side of the crossing without being recovered, according to Israeli officials, who blame a lack of UN personnel as the cause. The U.N. and other humanitarian agencies have had to rely on far fewer trucks entering daily from a single crossing in northern Gaza and via a U.S.-built dock transporting supplies by sea.
Aid groups are scrambling to get food to Palestinians as some 900,000 people flee Rafah and scatter across central and southern Gaza. Aid workers warn Gaza is close to starvation. UNRWA, the main UN agency in charge of the humanitarian effort, had to halt food distribution in the town of Rafah because it had run out of supplies.
The Egyptian announcement appears to resolve a political obstacle on one side of the border.
Israel says it has kept the Rafah crossing open and has asked Egypt to coordinate with it to send aid convoys through the crossing. Egypt refused, fearing that Israeli rule would remain permanent, and demanded that the Palestinians once again be responsible for the facility. The White House has been pressuring Egypt to resume the flow of trucks.
In a phone call with US President Joe Biden on Friday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi agreed to allow trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel to travel to the Kerem Shalom crossing until that a solution be found for the Rafah crossing, el-Sissi’s office said. in a report.
But it remains to be seen whether the UN will be able to access additional trucks from Egypt.
UNRWA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In an article published Thursday on the social network »
Mercy Corps, a humanitarian group operating in Gaza, said in a statement Friday that the offensive had caused the “functional closure… of the two main lines of survival” of aid and “brought the humanitarian system to its knees.”
“If dramatic changes do not occur, including opening all border crossings to deliver aid to these areas safely, we fear that a wave of secondary mortality will result as people succumb to the combination of hunger, lack of clean water and sanitation, and the spread of disease in areas where there is little medical care,” he said.
Fighting appears to be intensifying in Rafah. Shelling intensified on Friday in the eastern districts of the city, near Kerem Shalom, but shelling was also taking place in the central, southern and western districts, closer to the Rafah crossing, witnesses said .
Israeli leaders have said they must uproot Hamas fighters from Rafah to complete the group’s destruction after its October 7 attack.
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped around 250 others during the October 7 attack. About half of these hostages have since been releasedmost in exchanges for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel during a week-long ceasefire in November.
In a video statement, Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari says the bodies of three other hostages killed on October 7 were found overnight.
Israel’s campaign of bombings and offensives in Gaza has killed more than 35,800 Palestinians and injured more than 80,200 people, the Gaza Health Ministry announced Friday. Its count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said its troops discovered overnight the bodies of three people killed in the October 7 attack, then taken to Gaza and counted among the hostages.
The bodies of Hanan YablonkaMichel Nisenbaum and Orion Hernandez Radoux were found in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have been fighting with Hamas militants for a week, the army said.
The announcement comes less than a week after the military said it found in the same area the bodies of three other Israeli hostages also killed on October 7.
Nisenbaum, 59, was a Brazilian Israeli from the southern city of Sderot. He was killed in his car as he went to pick up his 4-year-old granddaughter from a site near Gaza that was attacked by militants.
Oryon Hernandez Radoux, 30, and Yablonka, 42, a father of two, were both killed while trying to escape from the Nova music festival, where attackers killed hundreds of people. Hernández Radoux attended the festival with his partner, German-Israeli Shani Louk, whose body was among those found earlier by the army.
Israel says around 100 hostages remain captive in Gaza, along with the bodies of at least 39 others, while 17 hostages’ bodies have been found.
The group representing the hostages’ families said the bodies had been returned to their families for burial. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country had a duty to do everything to return those kidnapped, both those killed and those alive.
French President Emmanuel Macron offered its condolences to the family of Hernández-Radoux, a French-Mexican citizen, saying that France remained determined to free the hostages.
CIA Director Bill Burns was meeting with Israeli and Qatari officials in Paris on Friday for informal discussions aimed at getting hostage and ceasefire negotiations back on track, an official said American, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss these sensitive discussions. Burns is in close contact with Egyptian officials who, like the Qataris, have acted as mediators with Hamas, the U.S. official said.
Ceasefire negotiations broke down earlier this month after heavy pressure from the United States and other mediators to reach an agreement, hoping to avert a planned Israeli invasion of the city of Rafah , in the south of the country. Negotiations have been blocked by a central sticking point: Hamas is demanding guarantees that the war will end and Israeli troops will completely withdraw from Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages, a demand Israel rejects.
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Keath and Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv and John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed.
News Source : apnews.com
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