The US said Israel didn’t breach its laws on blocking aid supplies even as a number of international organisations accused the country of failing to meet America’s deadline to allow greater humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip.
Washington on 13 October set a 30-day deadline for Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or potentially face restrictions on weapons supplies amid reports that it had cut off 90 per cent of aid movement between north and south Gaza nearly 13 months into the war on Gaza.
The Joe Biden administration said on Tuesday it would not limit weapons transfers to Israel because the Benjamin Netanyahu government had made “good but limited” progress in increasing aid flow into the battered and besieged Palestinian territory.
Northern Gaza has been virtually cut off from food for since Israel renewed its bombing campaign on 1 October, the UN has said.
In the south, hundreds of truckloads of aid were sitting on the Gaza side of the border, according to the UN, which couldn’t reach them to distribute due to the threat of lawlessness, theft and Israeli military restrictions.
The UN warned that the aid trickling into Gaza was at its lowest level in a year. Only about 34,000 tonnes of food, just one third of the previous month’s amount, entered the Palestinian territory in October, according to Israeli data.
Louise Wateridge, senior emergency coordinator for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), rejected the claim that Israel had done enough to meet America’s ultimatum.
“There is not enough aid here. There are not enough supplies,” she told the BBC from central Gaza. “People are starving in some areas. People are very hungry. They are fighting over bags of flour.”
In October, 57 trucks a day entered Gaza on average and 75 a day so far in November, according to official Israeli figures.
The UN said it has only received 39 trucks daily since the start of October. Washington had underlined the need to send about 350 aid trucks into Gaza through different crossings.
Israel on Tuesday opened a new crossing in central Gaza, outside the city of Deir al-Balah, for aid to enter. It also announced a small expansion of a coastal “humanitarian zone” where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been sheltering in tent camps.
It also claimed that hundreds of food packages and thousands of litres of water per day had earlier been delivered to distribution centres for people in the area of Beit Hanoun and another 741 trucks of aid were sent into North Gaza through the Erez crossing.
However, eight international aid organisations said that “Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria” but took actions “that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza”.
“That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago,” they added.
The World Food Programme said that it tried to send 14 trucks, but only three made it to the town “due to delays in receiving authorisation for movement and crowds along the route”.
When it tried to deliver the rest on Tuesday, Israel denied permission, it said.
About 900 truckloads of aid were sitting uncollected on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south, The Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories said.
“With the October 13 letter leaving no ambiguity about the Biden administration’s awareness of Israel’s ongoing violations, continued support constitutes knowingly aiding and abetting these crimes,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of nonprofit DAWN.
“The Biden administration must uphold US and international laws that prohibit assistance to nations committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 43,000 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, since Hamas attacked southern Israel last October and killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. Israel has launched an assault on Lebanon and bombed Syria as well since then, killing thousands of people.
