Palestinian carry the bodies of their relatives including children who were killed in an Israeli army airstrike in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. AP
Israel began allowing ridiculously inadequate' amount of aid into Gaza on Tuesday, but the aid has not yet reached Palestinians in desperate need.
Israel has been using starvation as a weapon in its genocidal war on Gaza.
Jens Laerke, the spokesperson for the U.N.'s humanitarian agency, said no trucks were picked up from the Gaza side of Karem Abu Salem, the Israeli border crossing with southern Gaza.
U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Tuesday that although the aid had entered Gaza, aid workers were not able to bring it to distribution points after the Israeli army forced them to reload the supplies onto separate trucks, and workers ran out of time.
The Israeli body that oversees humanitarian aid to Gaza said trucks were entering Gaza on Wednesday morning, but it was unclear if that aid would be able to continue deeper into Gaza for distribution. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said its staff had waited several hours to collect aid from the border crossing to begin distribution but were unable to do so on Tuesday.
A few dozen Israeli activists opposed to Israel's decision to allow aid into Gaza attempted to block the trucks carrying the aid on Wednesday morning, but were kept back by Israeli police.
Diplomats come under fire in Jenin
A group of diplomats came under fire while visiting Jenin, a city in the Israel-occupied West Bank. The diplomats were on an official mission to observe the humanitarian situation in Jenin when shots rang out.
An aid worker, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal, said a delegation of about 20 diplomats was being briefed about the Israeli brutal raids on Jenin by the Palestinian Authority. The group of regional, European and Western diplomats were standing near the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp when they heard gunshots just before 2 p.m., though it was unclear where the shots came from, she said. No one was injured, she added.
The Israeli occupation army said the visit had been approved, but claimed the delegation “deviated from the approved route”, and Israeli soldiers fired warning shots to distance them from the area.
Footage shows a number of diplomats giving media interviews as rapid shots ring out close to the group, forcing them to run for cover.
Jenin has been the site of Israel’s widespread crackdown against the occupied West Bank earlier this year.
On Jan. 21 — just two days after its ceasefire deal in Gaza — Israeli forces descended on Jenin as they have hundreds of times, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians, one of the largest West Bank displacements in years.
International pressure increases against Israel
On Tuesday, the United Kingdom. suspended free trade talks with Israel over its intensifying assault, a step that came a day after the U.K., Canada, and France promised concrete steps to prompt Israel to halt the genocidal war.
Separately, European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc was reviewing an EU pact governing trade ties with Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza.
Hamas says it is prepared to release the captives in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the territory and an end to the war. It rejects the Israeli new conditions for exile. Yet, Israel is still unwilling to stop the war and continues to claim more Palestinian lives.
Negotiations stalled as Israeli attacks widens
Israel called back its senior negotiating team from ceasefire talks in the Qatari capital of Doha on Tuesday, saying it would leave lower-level officials in place instead. Qatari leaders, who are mediating negotiations, said there was a large gap between the two sides that they had been unable to bridge.
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes continued across Gaza. In the southern city of Khan Younis, where Israel recently ordered new evacuations pending an expected expanded offensive, 24 people were killed, 14 of them from the same family. A week-old infant was killed in central Gaza.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday urged world leaders to take immediate action to end Israel’s siege on Gaza, issuing the appeal in a written statement during a visit to Beirut.
“I call on world leaders to take urgent and decisive measures to break the siege on our people in the Gaza Strip,” Abbas said, demanding the immediate entry of aid, an end to the Israeli offensive, the release of detainees, and a full withdrawal from Gaza.
“It is time to end the war of extermination against the Palestinian people. I reiterate that we will not leave, and we will remain here on the land of our homeland, Palestine,” Abbas said.
Israel, which has destroyed large swaths of Palestinian territory, has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
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