The first aid shipment to reach Gaza by sea in nearly two decades was fully unloaded on Saturday at a makeshift jetty in the Mediterranean, marking a milestone in an operation that Western officials hope will ease the enclave’s worsening food shortages.
The ship, the Open Arms, towed a barge from Cyprus loaded with around 200 tonnes of rice, flour, lentils and tinned tuna, beef and chicken, supplied by the World Central Kitchen charity.
José Andrés, the Spanish-American chef who founded World Central Kitchen, said his group would begin shipping food by truck, including to northern Gaza, an area wracked by lawlessness and heavily damaged by Israeli strikes. air strikes.
However, the distribution was to unfold in the shadow of a series of attacks that killed or injured Palestinians struggling for desperately needed food. United Nations aid agencies were forced to largely suspend deliveries in northern Gaza last month, and its human rights office has documented more than 20 such attacks.
The latest bloodshed occurred late Thursday in Gaza City, where at least 20 people were killed after an aid convoy was attacked. Gaza health officials and the Israeli military have shifted blame. many details of what had unfolded remained unclear Saturday.
World Central Kitchen offered few details about its distribution plan, although it was loading a second supply ship in Cyprus. The Israeli military said in a statement that it had deployed naval and ground forces to secure the area where the supplies were being unloaded, although it remained unclear who would handle the distribution.
“Open Arms connected a barge filled with nearly 200 tonnes of food to the wharf WCK built on the Gaza coast,” the charity said in a statement, referring to a wharf it built from rubble off the Gaza Strip. “The entire cargo has been unloaded and is being prepared for distribution to Gaza.”
The 200 tons of food delivered by sea is the equivalent of about 10 trucks, a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 150 trucks a day that the United Nations aid agency, UNRWA, says are currently entering Gaza. And even that is only a fraction of what is needed, aid organizations say, to provide sufficient food for the people of Gaza.
With the enclave under near-total blockade after more than five months of Israeli bombardment, the UN has warned that much of it is at risk of starvation and called on Israel to ensure more food and medical care reaches Gaza.
A new report released on Friday by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, found that children in the Gaza Strip are facing rapidly deepening food deprivation and that an alarming number are suffering from “severe wasting”, the most life-threatening form malnutrition. .
About one in 20 children in shelters and health centers in northern Gaza have fallen into this condition, defined as dangerously thin for their height, the report said. He cited screenings conducted by the organization.
The tests found that acute malnutrition, meaning the body is deprived of essential nutrients, had become quite common among children under the age of 2 across Gaza. In some areas, acute malnutrition rates had doubled since they were last recorded in January, the report said.
By comparison, the rate of acute malnutrition among young children was less than 1 percent before the war, UNICEF said.
The situation could soon become more dire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel plans to launch a ground attack on Rafah, a southern city where more than half of Gaza’s population has taken refuge.
Western officials expressed hope that negotiations on a ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners would resume in the coming days. Mr. Netanyahu planned to send an Israeli delegation soon to Qatar, the site of the mediation efforts.
Hamas has updated its own proposal, no longer requiring Israel to immediately agree to a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in exchange for the start of a hostage and prisoner exchange, according to people familiar with the negotiations. . Hamas withdrew its demand for a permanent ceasefire and offered to release hostages in exchange for the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from parts of the Gaza Strip as well as the release of prisoners.
Meanwhile, Israel remains under intense pressure to open more land crossings into Gaza to allow aid to speed up. Aid officials stressed that delivering supplies by sea or air is much less efficient than by truck.
Open Arms is the first vessel authorized to deliver aid to Gaza since 2005, according to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm. He described the operation as a pilot project to study the opening of a sea corridor to supply the region.
The United States is also leading an initiative to create a temporary floating jetty off the coast of Gaza to facilitate the transit of goods. US officials hope the pier could make it possible to deliver two million meals a day to the region’s 2.3 million people.
World Central Kitchen is preparing to send a second ship of food from the Cypriot port of Larnaca, the charity said, but it is unclear when it will set sail. The vessel is equipped with two forklifts and a crane to assist with future sea deliveries and is expected to carry 240 tons of food including carrots, canned tuna, chickpeas, corn, rice, flour, oil and salt, as well as over 250 pounds of fresh dates donated by the United Arab Emirates.
Since October, organizers and Palestinian cooks working with World Central Kitchen have served more than 37 million meals in Gaza, the group says.
The charity is also trucking aid from its warehouses in Cairo and supplying food for airdrops carried out from Jordan and the United States. On Friday, 23 tonnes of food fell in the north, Mr Andres said.
Monica Prodchuk reported from Brussels and Gaya Gupta and Nikolaos Fantos from New York. Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
