JERUSALEM — Israel’s military said on Sunday that it would stop fighting during the day along a route in southern Gaza. This is to make room for more deliveries of humanitarian aid to help the desperate Palestinians who are going through a humanitarian crisis caused by the war, which has been going on for nine months.
The international community, including Israel’s biggest ally, the US, wants a full cease-fire in the area. The “tactical pause,” which covers more than seven miles of road in the Rafah area, is not even close to what they want. It might help meet the huge number of Palestinians’ needs that have grown since Israel invaded Rafah a few weeks ago.
The army said the daily break would start at 8 a.m. local time and go until 7 p.m., or until further notice. The goal is to make it safe for aid trucks to get to the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing, which is controlled by Israel and is the main entry point, and then to the Salah a-Din highway, which runs north to south. Since Israeli troops moved into Rafah in early May, the crossing has been backed up.
The Israeli military group COGAT is in charge of distributing aid in Gaza. They said that the new route would make it easier for aid to get to Khan Younis, the Muwasi coastal area, and central Gaza. A very early target of the war, northern Gaza is hard hit. Goods coming in from the north help the area.
The military said that the break, which starts when Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, was decided upon after talks with the UN and other aid groups.
Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N., told the Associated Press that Israel’s news was good, but that “no aid has been dispatched from Kerem Shalom today,” without giving any more information. Laerke said that the U.N. wants Israel to take more concrete steps, such as making things run more smoothly at checkpoints and letting fuel in on a regular basis.
Israel and Hamas are thinking about the latest plan for a cease-fire that was laid out by U.S. President Joe Biden. This is the administration’s most focused diplomatic effort to end the fighting and free the hostages that the militant group has taken. Biden said that the idea came from Israelis, but Israel hasn’t fully backed it yet. Israel doesn’t agree with the changes that Hamas wants.
The news of the military’s pause caused a small political storm because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised to keep fighting and many members of his far-right government were against the cease-fire plan.
Netanyahu told an Israeli official that when he heard about the plan, it was “unacceptable to him.” The official said that Netanyahu was told that the military’s policy would not change and that fighting in Rafah would continue as planned. The official spoke on the condition that he not be named because he wasn’t allowed to talk to the media.
After the fact, Israeli TV stations said that Netanyahu had said something negative about the military: “We have a country with an army, not an army with a country.”
However, neither Netanyahu nor the army changed the plans. In southern Gaza, the army said, “There is no cessation of fighting.” However, they also said that the new route would be open during the day “exclusively for the transportation of humanitarian aid.”
The fighting kept going. Nine people, five of them children, were killed when a house was hit in Bureji, which is in the middle of Gaza, on Sunday. AP reporters who were there to count the bodies said the number of deaths was nine. A man cried over the small bundle wrapped in a sheet that he was holding. Two of the kids were outside having fun.
“Beirut, what did this girl do to you?” Isn’t this against your rules?” A woman cried as she held a dead child.
When asked about the strike, Israel’s military didn’t answer.
Israel named the 12 soldiers who died in recent attacks in Gaza. They are the 309 soldiers who have died since Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza last year. IDF says that Hamas killed about 1,200 people in its attack on October 7 and held 250 hostage. There have been more than 37,000 deaths in Gaza, which is run by Hamas.
The military offensive by Israel has made things very bad for the people of Gaza. According to the UN, hundreds of thousands of people are on the verge of going hungry.
Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, asked for more pressure to be put on the government to open up border crossings. Because Israel moved into the city, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt is no longer open. For as long as Israel controls the Palestinian side, Egypt has refused to open the crossing again.
In southern Gaza, the flow of aid has slowed down just as the need has grown. After the invasion, more than a million Palestinians, many of whom had already been forced to leave their homes, made their way to other parts of southern and central Gaza. Most of them are stuck in tent cities where sewage flows freely into the streets.
About 68 trucks of aid came to the U.N. every day from May 6 to June 6. That was less than the 168 a day that were recorded in April and a lot less than the 500 a day that aid groups say are needed.
COGAT says there are no rules about trucks coming in. It says that between May 2 and June 13, more than 8,600 trucks, both aid and commercial, came into Gaza through all of its crossings. That’s an average of 201 trucks a day. A lot of that aid, though, has piled up at crossings.
Shimon Freedman, a spokesman for COGAT, said that the U.N. was to blame for the cargo building up on the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom. He said that its agencies have “fundamental logistical problems,” like not having enough trucks.
The U.N. denies these claims. It says that the fighting in Gaza makes it unsafe for UN trucks to go to Kerem Shalom most of the time. It also says that deliveries have slowed down because Israel’s military has to give drivers permission to go to the site. Israel says this is for the safety of the drivers.
By giving drivers an 11-hour window every day, the new plan is meant to make it easier to schedule deliveries.
Because there isn’t enough security, people have stolen from some aid trucks as they drove through Gaza. It wasn’t clear right away if the army would be there to protect the trucks that were moving along the highway.
