Aid remained stuck near Egypt’s border with Gaza as Israel resumed its military campaign on Friday, with truck drivers saying they expected further delays in a complex delivery process that had briefly accelerated during a one-week truce.
“The bombings have been going on since seven in the morning. There are planes and artillery and we have not moved,” said driver Saleh Ebada, who had already been waiting eight days to enter the terminal for inspection when the fighting resumed.
Egyptian security sources and a Red Crescent official said aid and fuel trucks had stopped entering from Egypt.
U.N. officials called the renewed fighting “catastrophic” and said the continued delivery of aid was in doubt.
A spokesperson for the Rafah border crossing confirmed that the entry into the Gaza Strip of trucks carrying much-needed aid, fuel and cooking gas from Egypt had been halted due to the resumption of Israeli bombings.
Rafah has been the only aid entry point into Gaza since Israel began besieging and bombarding the coastal territory in retaliation for a deadly October 7 incursion and hostage capture by the Palestinian armed group Hamas. .
Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, called on “all living consciences” to authorize the opening of the Rafah crossing in the context of an “extremely catastrophic” humanitarian crisis.
“The medical aid that arrived in Gaza during the truce is only enough for one day,” al-Qudra said in a statement. “The health sector in Gaza is broken in every sense of the word,” he said.
Only three hospitals operate in Gaza and they are not equipped to receive large numbers of patients, he added.
His comments came as Israeli airstrikes killed at least 109 people and injured hundreds, according to Palestinian officials. Doctors are struggling to help patients who are crowding into hospitals due to a shortage of beds.
More than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to Palestinian officials. In Israel, the official death toll from the October 7 attack is around 1,200 people.
Help during the truce
International flights land at El Arish airport in Sinai to deliver aid shipments. Truck convoys are also bringing aid from Cairo.
Under a system in place since October 21, humanitarian trucks were to go for inspection to the Al-Awja and Nitzana border crossings, on Egypt’s border with Israel, before returning to Rafah to deliver their cargoes, one way -return of more than 80 km (50 miles) which aid workers and Egyptian officials say has caused bottlenecks.
A truce agreed last week allowed more food, medicine, fuel and water to be delivered, but the quantities remained far below the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, most of them internally displaced. inside the country by war.
Egyptian truck drivers said they were subjected to long delays while waiting for inspections and scans of goods supervised by Israeli security personnel in Al-Awja.
“All the obstacles are there because they are the ones controlling the movement of goods,” said Gameel Mahmoud Idrees, a driver waiting near the Rafah crossing with a shipment of food, his second aid delivery since the start of the war.
“We go into the passage and wait four or five days until the inspection is completed,” he said.
The United Nations has been pushing for Israel to open the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing near Rafah, which handled large quantities of goods before the war. But Israel, which fears that this aid could be used by Hamas, has so far refused.
The truce allowed around 200 aid trucks to enter Gaza daily, more than double the previous average. This compares to 500 trucks per day before the war, when there was less need for urgent supplies.
Before the truce, Egyptian truck drivers unloaded in Rafah, goods were loaded onto another truck for distribution in Gaza, and deliveries were sometimes interrupted by fuel shortages or bombings.
During the truce, some trucks were traveling from the Egyptian side directly to Gaza, Ebada said.
Idrees, the truck’s second driver, said as fighting resumed he could easily be stuck for a week.
“We are waiting to get security clearance because there are around 350 trucks inside (in Al-Awja), and we have to finish with them first,” he said.