Amid the roar of military jet engines, workers unload essential supplies at Egypt’s Al-Arich airport as international aid begins to flow into the besieged Gaza Strip.
• Also read: Hamas toll: 5,000 dead, including 2,055 children, in the Gaza Strip
• Also read: Gaza: More than 70 dead in Israeli attacks
Officials bark orders and forklifts race across the tarmac to transport unloaded products, including food and medicine.
For days, aid deliveries have been arriving by air in Al-Arich, about 45 kilometers from Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, the only access to the small, devastated Palestinian territory that is not in Israel’s hands.
But it was only at the weekend that the first deliveries were allowed to reach the small Palestinian territory with 2.4 million inhabitants, which has been completely besieged by Israel since the surprise attack by Hamas.
AFP
On October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest period, hundreds of fighters from the Palestinian Islamist movement entered Israel from the Gaza Strip, sowing terror in an attack unprecedented since Israel’s founding in 1948 and triggering a murderous war.
Authorities said more than 1,400 people were killed on Israeli soil, most of them civilians who were shot, burned alive or mutilated on the day of the attack.
According to the Israeli army, Hamas kidnapped 222 hostages, Israelis and foreigners.
Israeli retaliatory bombings of the Gaza Strip have killed more than 5,000 people, the vast majority civilians, including more than 2,000 children, according to the Hamas government’s latest overall report released Monday.
Only three aid convoys, about fifty trucks, have crossed the Rafa border crossing since Saturday, loaded with water and medical supplies.
The United Nations estimates that Gaza’s population, nearly half of which has been displaced by Israeli bombing, needs 100 aid trucks a day.
On Sunday, two Qatari planes and an Indian plane landed in Al-Arich in less than an hour, and dozens of Egyptian Red Crescent workers rushed to unload them.
Youssef al-Mulla, a humanitarian worker with the Qatar Development Fund, said the Gulf emirate had provided more than 100 tons of aid to the Gaza Strip since the crisis began.
“This is the fourth flight to land in Al-Arich,” he told AFP at the airport, explaining that the first two flights delivered 37 tonnes of aid and the others delivered around 86 tonnes.
According to him, only two trucks carrying aid from Qatar entered the Gaza Strip on Sunday.
AFP
“We have (…) help in Qatar. It is ready to send it to Egypt at any time, he said, “but we cannot store it in Egyptian territory, where the warehouses are already full, and we cannot send it to Gaza,” he continued.
The arrival of the two planes on Sunday was scheduled for three days, but was delayed “due to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli blockade,” Mulla said.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths called the first aid deliveries to Gaza a “small glimmer of hope” but warned that people would need “more, much more”.
The United States has promised continued aid deliveries through a deal negotiated by President Joe Biden with Egyptian and Israeli leaders.
As one of Qatar’s two planes left Al-Arich on Sunday to return to Doha, it left its cargo neatly stacked on the airport tarmac, waiting to be transported to the hard-hit Gaza Strip. The UN warned that the humanitarian situation was “catastrophic”.