Questions remain as Israel supports more aid for Gaza
Israeli Aid in Gaza: State of the Art and Prospects for Forward-Looking Initiatives, Not the Expected Results from Recent Operationes
Israel has endorsed three new aid efforts over the past week — a ship carrying food approaching the coast off Gaza; airdrops by foreign countries; and an initial convoy of six trucks crossing directly from Israel into northern Gaza, where aid agencies say hunger is severest, for the first time since Oct. 7.
The images emerging from Gaza may have been a tipping point for policymakers according to an Israeli political analyst and a columnist at Haaretz. She said that Israel has a limit to how much opprobrium it will take and stand behind.
Aid organizations and U.N. officials say the new efforts are too small and inefficient to meet the enormous needs of Gazan civilians. It would be better for Israel to allow more trucks to enter into the enclave and also to speed up delivery of goods in Gaza.
These groups say that airdrops can deliver just a fraction of the food that a truck convoy can haul. It will be expensive to set up the infrastructure for aid delivery by sea, and it will take a long time.
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Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli Military Dispute Israel’s Claims in an Interaction Between Palestinians and Foreign Embassies
For at least the second time in just over two weeks, a convoy bringing aid to hunger-stricken northern Gaza ended in bloodshed late Thursday when Palestinians were killed and wounded in an attack surrounding the trucks, according to Gazan health officials and the Israeli military, which offered divergent accounts of what happened.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 20 people have been killed and over 150 injured in what it describes as a targeted Israeli attack on a crowd of civilians waiting for humanitarian aid.
The Israeli military denied the allegations in a statement, saying that no tank fire, airstrike or gunfire was used against civilians at the aid convoy. It did not say whether Israeli forces had opened fire at all.
Nobody knew who sent the latest supplies, or who drove the trucks, or provided security for them. UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said it wasn’t involved. The Israeli military said it had aided the way for the 31 trucks, but did not elaborate on that.
A doctor at the hospital who treated victims of the shelling said their wounds looked like they had come from Israeli shells, not bullets from rifles.
