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SvennoJ on 08 March 2024
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UN’s Sigrid Kaag says ‘little willingness’ from Israel for more aid crossings

“Domestic sensitivities” in Israel, such as demonstrations, are stopping the Israeli government from opening additional crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations’ senior coordinator for humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Gaza.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting, Kaag said that she told the Council that the aim should be to “flood the market in Gaza with humanitarian goods as well as re-energise the private sector”.

“At the moment, the Israeli cabinet has not taken a decision to open additional crossings. It’s fairly factual. And we need more of those. It’s been made very clear to me from the outset that there is little willingness,” she said.


Bernie Sanders lauds Gaza humanitarian port, slams Israel for blocking aid

Bernie Sanders has welcomed Biden’s decision to establish a port to deliver aid to Gaza and called it a “necessary step”. But in a statement, he lamented the fact that American taxpayers are having to “pay even more to build a port to get aid into starving people, because Israel won’t let it be driven safely and efficiently across the border”.

“Despite months of increasingly urgent requests from the very highest officials in the US government, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extreme, right-wing government have refused to let in sufficient humanitarian aid,” he said.


UN envoy says sanctions, arms embargo only way to stop Gaza ‘genocide’

Posting on X, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has said an “arms embargo and economic sanctions on Israel are the only way to stop the genocide in Gaza”.

Albanese was responding to a post by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres highlighting his meeting with family members of victims in Gaza, some of whom had “lost over a hundred relatives”.

Airdrops, temporary seaport ‘not realistic’ solutions: MAP

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) says “airdrops, temporary seaports and the like are not realistic or lasting solutions to stave off looming famine and sustain life in Gaza” after Biden announced a plan to build a temporary pier off Gaza’s coast to deliver aid.

“Five months on, it is long past time for the US, the UK and others to use their substantial weight to ensure that their ally Israel immediately reopens land crossings into Gaza,” MAP CEO Melanie Ward told Al Jazeera.

“Only an immediate and lasting ceasefire will allow us to deliver the massive humanitarian response that is required after five months of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and siege of the people of Gaza.”


Von der Leyen says Cyprus maritime corridor to open this weekend

While on her visit to Cyprus, the EU chief said a sea corridor from Cyprus to Gaza will likely open this weekend, after a pilot shipment takes place today. “We are here because the Palestinians in Gaza need our help and the humanitarian situation there is very tragic,” said Ursula von der Leyen, adding that the sea passageway could be a “radical change” for aid access.

The US plans to help build a temporary pier in Gaza to receive the Gaza-bound sea shipments, President Biden announced on Thursday night.

However, the UN and aid groups say sea deliveries are not nearly as efficient as truck shipments, and have urged Israeli authorities to stop blocking aid trucks from crossing into Gaza.

US says temporary port for Gaza aid to take ‘several weeks’

A temporary port the United States is seeking to build to speed up aid to Gaza will take “several weeks” in planning and execution. The process may involve 1,000 US troops but none will be put on the ground, the Pentagon says. Washington is working through the details with partner nations in the Middle East.

However, experts have criticised the move as an attempt to divert attention from hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians, and Israel’s consistent blocking of assistance to the long-besieged enclave.


Doctors worry US aid plan will fail to reach Gaza in time

Doctors in Gaza are concerned that the US plan to build a temporary port off Gaza’s coast to step up the delivery of humanitarian aid will be too little, too late. Saleh al-Hams, director of nursing at Gaza European Hospital, told Al Jazeera that the US plan comes as the war enters its sixth month.

“Where has the American conscience been for 153 days since the beginning of the war, as people in the Gaza Strip are under constant bombardment?” he asked. The construction of the pier “may take several weeks, meaning that our people will continue to suffer”, he said, adding that it is “reprehensible” that the pier would be only a few kilometres from the Rafah border, where hundreds of trucks are lined up waiting for permission to enter.

The focus should be on “lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip and opening the crossings to bring in everything the people of Gaza need,” he said.

Director of Al-Nasr hospital calls aid delivery ‘dust in the eyes’

Mustafa al-Kahlout, Director of Al Nassr Pediatric Hospital in Gaza City, says the little aid that has so far trickled into Gaza is “dust in the eyes”, as the quantities delivered by trucks and airdrops are insufficient to address even the most basic needs of the population.

“The aid is only formal,” al-Kahlout told Al Jazeera, adding that a US plan to deliver aid through a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza could be another grand gesture that makes little difference on the ground, similarly to the airdrops that delivered the equivalent of just a few trucks of aid.

As for the plan announced by aid in his State of the Union speech on Thursday, “one must judge from when and how much aid will arrive,” al-Kahlout said.