Eighty-one trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom and Egypt’s Rafah crossings on Friday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, Ednews informs via the Times of Israel.
Kerem Shalom had been closed for three days until Friday due to what OCHA says were security incidents, including an IDF drone strike, the seizure of aid by desperate locals and unannounced and uncoordinated prisoner and casualty transfers from Israel.
“The volume of aid remains woefully inadequate,” OCHA says in a statement. “The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator ‘that this is an impossible situation for the people of Gaza and for those trying to help them. The fighting must stop.'”
Israel maintains that it is inspecting hundreds of trucks every day and that the reason for the bottleneck is the failure of UN facilitators to keep up with the pace. The UN has argued that mass aid delivery is impossible amid the IDF’s aerial and ground operations in Gaza.
Before the escalation, roughly 500 trucks of aid were entering Gaza each day.
