A fence sits locked at the entrance to the Kerem Shalom border crossing in Israel, as military operations continued in Rafah on May 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Egypt and the United States agreed on May 24 to temporarily send humanitarian aid to the United Nations in Gaza via Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing until legal mechanisms are established to reopen the Rafah border crossing from the Palestinian side, the Egyptian presidency said.

The agreement resulted from “the difficult humanitarian situation of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the lack of means of life in the Strip, and the lack of fuel needed for hospitals and bakeries,” said the statement.

The agreement was reached in a phone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the statement said.

Egypt, on May 20, warned against Israel’s continued military operations in Rafah, which were preventing aid deliveries to the impoverished Strip.

Much of the aid delivered into Gaza since the conflict between Israel and Hamas began in October has come through Egypt, entering through the southern Gaza city of Rafah or the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing on Israel’s border with the Palestinian territory.

Since May 5, just before Israeli forces took control of the Rafah crossing from the Palestinian side, no trucks have crossed through Rafah and very few through Kerem Shalom, according to U.N. data.

Mr. Sisi and Mr. Biden also agreed to intensify international efforts to make Gaza ceasefire talks a success and end the “prolonged human tragedy experienced by the Palestinian people,” the statement added.

The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on May 16, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.

The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered it to help Palestinians facing starvation as food and other supplies fail to make it in as Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push on that southern city on the Egyptian border.

Fraught with logistical, weather and security challenges, the maritime route is designed to bolster the amount of aid getting into the Gaza Strip, but it is not considered a substitute for far cheaper land-based deliveries that aid agencies say are much more sustainable. The boatloads of aid will be deposited at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City and then distributed by aid groups.

U.S. troops will not set foot in Gaza, American officials insist, though they acknowledge the danger of operating near the war zone.

Heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants on the outskirts of Rafah has displaced some 600,000 people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, U.N. officials say. Another 100,000 civilians have fled parts of northern Gaza now that the Israeli military has restarted combat operations there.

Pentagon officials said the fighting in Gaza wasn’t threatening the new shoreline aid distribution area, but they have made it clear that security conditions will be monitored closely and could prompt a shutdown of the maritime route, even just temporarily. Already, the site has been targeted by mortar fire during its construction and Hamas has threatened to target any foreign forces who “occupy” the Gaza Strip.

The “protection of U.S. forces participating is a top priority. And as such, in the last several weeks, the United States and Israel have developed an integrated security plan to protect all the personnel who are working,” said Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, a deputy commander at the U.S. military’s Central Command. “We are confident in the ability of this security arrangement to protect those involved.”

U.S. troops anchored the pier at 7:40 a.m. local time on May 16, the military’s Central Command said in a statement, which stressed that none of its forces entered the Gaza Strip.

“Trucks carrying humanitarian assistance are expected to begin moving ashore in the coming days,” the statement said. “The United Nations will receive the aid and coordinate its distribution into Gaza.”

It wasn’t immediately clear which U.N. agency would be involved.

Israeli forces will be in charge of security on the shore, but there are also two U.S. Navy warships near the area in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the USS Arleigh Burke and the USS Paul Ignatius. Both ships are destroyers equipped with a wide range of weapons and capabilities to protect American troops off shore and allies on the beach.

Aid agencies say they are running out of food in southern Gaza and fuel is dwindling, which will force hospitals to shut down critical operations and halt truck deliveries of aid. The United Nations and other agencies have warned for weeks that an Israel assault on Rafah, which is on the border with Egypt near the main aid entry points, would cripple humanitarian operations and cause a disastrous surge in civilian casualties.

More than 1.4 million Palestinians — half of Gaza’s population — have been sheltering in Rafah, most after fleeing Israel’s offensives elsewhere.

The first cargo ship loaded with 475 pallets of food left Cyprus last week to rendezvous with a U.S. military ship, the Roy P. Benavidez, which is off the coast of Gaza. The pallets of aid on the MV Sagamore were moved onto the Benavidez. The Pentagon said moving the aid between ships was an effort to be ready so it could flow quickly once the pier and the causeway were installed.

The installation of the pier several miles (kilometers) off the coast and of the causeway, which is now anchored to the beach, was delayed for nearly two weeks because of bad weather and high seas. The sea conditions made it too dangerous for U.S. and Israeli troops to secure the causeway to the shore and do other final assembly work, U.S. officials said.

According to a defense official, the Sagamore’s initial shipment was estimated to provide enough to feed 11,000 people for one month. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public.

Military leaders have said the deliveries of aid will begin slowly to ensure the system works. They will start with about 90 truckloads of aid a day through the sea route, and that number will quickly grow to about 150 a day. But aid agencies say that isn’t enough to avert impending famine in Gaza and must be just one part of a broader Israeli effort to open land corridors.

Biden used his State of the Union address on March 7 to order the military to set up a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, establishing a sea route to deliver food and other aid. Food shipments have been backed up at land crossings amid Israeli restrictions and intensifying fighting.

Under the new sea route, humanitarian aid is dropped off in Cyprus where it will undergo inspection and security checks at Larnaca port. It is then loaded onto ships — mainly commercial vessels — and taken about 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the large floating pier built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast.

There, the pallets are transferred onto trucks, driven onto smaller Army boats and then shuttled several miles (kilometres) to the floating causeway, which has been anchored onto the beach by the Israeli military. The trucks, which are being driven by personnel from another country, will go down the causeway into a secure area on land where they will drop off the aid and immediately turn around and return to the boats.

Aid groups will collect the supplies for distribution on shore, with the U.N. working with the U.S. Agency for International Development to set up the logistics hub on the beach.

Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters that the project will cost at least $320 million, including the transportation of the equipment and pier sections from the United States to the coast of Gaza, as well as the construction and aid delivery operations.

Geneva:

The first aid delivery into the besieged Gaza Strip via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt should take place “in the next day or so”, the United Nations said Friday.

“We are in deep and advanced negotiations with all relevant sides to ensure that an aid operation in Gaza starts as quickly as possible… a first delivery is due to start in the next day or so,” the UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said, quoted by his spokesman Jens Laerke in Geneva.

Laerke told reporters: “I do not have an exact time for when these movements will take place, of course, with the hope that they can begin as soon as possible, in a way that is safe, secure and hopefully sustained.

“We need to have the mechanism in place whereby this can be driven into southern Gaza. That does not take away from our call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”

Desperately needed international aid piled up Friday in Egypt near Gaza, with Palestinians in dire need of food and water after relentless bombing by Israel, still reeling from the bloodiest attack in its history.

The UN says more than one million of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced and that the humanitarian situation is worsening by the day.

Egyptian state-linked broadcaster Al Qahera News had said the Rafah crossing — the only route into Gaza — would open on Friday, but Cairo later said it needed more time to repair roads.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after the Islamist group launched a massive attack from the Gaza Strip on October 7, killing at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.

In response, Israeli war planes have levelled entire city blocks in Gaza in preparation for a ground invasion they say is coming soon. More than 3,785 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died in the bombing, according to the latest toll from the Hamas-run health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Rafah, Palestinian Territories:

The area of the Rafah border crossing between the blockaded Gaza Strip and Egypt was hit Monday in a military strike, AFP correspondents said, as hundreds of Palestinians gathered hoping to cross.

The area of the shuttered crossing point in Gaza’s south had been hit at least three times last week by Israeli air strikes after Gaza-based Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7 that triggered all-out war.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)