A long-awaited convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian aid has crossed into southern Gaza for the first time since Israel began a devastating siege 12 days ago, as Israel’s military pounded northern Gaza and warned it would increase its attacks.
US President Joe Biden cheered the arrival of the aid after days of intense negotiations and said the United States was committed to ensuring more assistance would enter via southern Gaza Strip’s Rafah border point with Egypt.
“We will continue to work with all parties to keep the Rafah crossing in operation,” Biden said in a statement.
Twenty flatbed trucks, flying white flags and honking their horns, exited the crossing after checks and headed into Gaza’s southern area which includes the major towns of Rafah and Khan Younis where hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by Israel’s unrelenting air war are sheltering.
However, Palestinian officials were disappointed that fuel supplies were not included and added that the relief was only three per cent of what used to get into Gaza in terms of medical and humanitarian aid before the crisis.
“Excluding the fuel from the humanitarian aid means the lives of patients and injured will remain at risk. Gaza hospitals are running out of the basic requirements to pursue medical interventions,” the Gaza health ministry said.
Israel’s “total siege” of Gaza after the October 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel by militants of the Islamist movement Hamas has left Gaza’s its 2.3 million people running out of food, water, medicines and fuel.
The United Nations said the convoy included life-saving supplies that would be received and distributed by the Palestinian Red Crescent, with Hamas’ consent.
Israel has warned that no aid should end up in Hamas hands.
Israel kept up heavy bombardment of targets throughout Gaza in Saturday’s early hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “fight until victory” following the release of the first two hostages by Hamas.
Hamas on Friday freed US citizens Judith Tai Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, who were among around 210 kidnapped in the assault on southern Israel by Hamas this month.
Hamas said it acted in part “for humanitarian reasons” in response to Qatari mediation.
Hamas gunmen seized the hostages when they burst out of the blockaded enclave into Israel and killed 1400 people, mainly civilians, in a shock rampage, the deadliest single attack on Israelis since the country’s founding 75 years ago.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Saturday Israel’s air and missile strikes had killed at least 4385 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while more than a million of the besieged territory’s 2.3 million people have been displaced.
Overnight Israeli fighter jets struck a “large number of Hamas terror targets throughout” Gaza including command centres and combat positions inside multi-storey buildings, the military said.
Gaza’s health ministry and Hamas media said Israeli aircraft had overnight targeted several family houses across Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated places, killing at least 50 people and injuring dozens.
Hamas said it fired rockets towards Israeli’s biggest city Tel Aviv on Saturday in response to those deaths.
The Israeli military reported a fresh salvo of rockets from Gaza against southern Israeli border communities before dawn.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that the aid entering Gaza would go only to southern areas where it has urged Palestinian civilians to congregate “as we continue to intensify strikes” in the north of the enclave.
Terrified Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes after Israel’s deadly overnight bombings lashed out at the reports of aid trucks about to enter Gaza, saying it was a ceasefire and not food that they needed.
Most of Gaza’s inhabitants depend on humanitarian aid.
The heavily urbanised coastal strip has been under Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Hamas seized control of it 16 years ago, two years after Israeli ended a 38-year occupation.
Before the outbreak of conflict, an average of about 450 aid trucks were arriving daily in Gaza.
Some said the aid arriving on Saturday was too little to make a difference.
“This is a drop in the ocean. You are trying to show the world that you are bringing aid. This is throwing dust in the eyes,” said Nabil El-Dhaba, a resident of the Shejaia district in Gaza City who has been displaced to Deir Al-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip.
