Israel said on Sunday it would halt military operations for 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza and allow new aid corridors as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates airdropped aid to the enclave, where images of starving Palestinians have alarmed the world.
Israel has been facing growing international criticism over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with Amnesty International already declaring its actions in Gaza as a “genocide”, which Tel Aviv rejects. Indirect ceasefire talks in Doha between Israel and Hamas have broken off with no deal in sight.
Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on March 2 after ceasefire talks broke down. In late May, it began allowing a small trickle of aid to resume, amid warnings of a wave of starvation.
Military activity will stop from 10am to 8pm (12pm to 10pm PKT) until further notice in Al-Mawasi, a designated humanitarian area along the coast, in central Deir al-Balah and in Gaza City, to the north.
The military said designated secure routes for convoys delivering food and medicine will also be in place between 6am and 11pm starting from Sunday.
Jordan and the UAE parachuted 25 tons of aid into the Gaza Strip today in their first airdrop in months, a Jordanian official source said.
The official said the air drops were not a substitute for delivery by land. Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy also said Israel’s decision “alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza”.
Palestinian health officials in Gaza City said at least 10 people were injured by falling aid boxes.
United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said staff would step up efforts to feed the hungry during the pauses in the designated areas.
“Our teams on the ground … will do all we can to reach as many starving people as we can in this window,” he said on X.
Israeli firing killed at least 17 people and wounded 50 waiting for aid trucks today, health officials at Al-Awda and Al-Aqsa Hospitals in the central Gaza Strip said. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The Gaza health ministry reported six new deaths over the past 24 hours due to malnutrition, bringing the total deaths from malnutrition and hunger to 133, including 87 children.
Yesterday, a five-month-old baby, Zainab Abu Haleeb, died of malnutrition at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, health workers said.
“Three months inside the hospital and this is what I get in return, that she is dead,” said her mother, Israa Abu Haleeb, standing next to the baby’s father as he held their daughter’s body wrapped in a white shroud.
The Egyptian Red Crescent said it was sending more than 100 trucks carrying over 1,200 metric tons of food to southern Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Sunday.
Aid groups said last week there was mass starvation among Gaza’s 2.2 million people and international alarm over the humanitarian situation has increased, driving French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state in September.
A group of 25 states, including Britain, France and Canada, last week condemned the “drip feeding of aid” and said Israel’s denial of essential humanitarian aid was unacceptable.
“We ask God and our Arab brothers to work harder to reach a ceasefire before we all die,” Gaza resident Hossam Sobh told AFP, adding that he had feared death as he recovered a bag of flour under the nose of an Israeli tank.
The Israeli military also claimed it had begun air-dropping food into the territory and rejected allegations it was using starvation as a weapon against Palestinian civilians.
In a statement, the army said it coordinated its decisions with the UN and international organisations to “increase the scale of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip”.
The Israeli statement claimed that “designated secure routes” had been opened across all of Gaza to enable the safe passage of UN and humanitarian aid organisation convoys delivering and distributing food and medicine.
UN to use pauses to try to reach Gaza’s starving
The United Nations said it would try to reach as many starving people as possible in Gaza after Israel announced it would establish secure land routes for humanitarian convoys.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said it had enough food in, or on its way to, the region to feed the over 2m people in the Gaza Strip for almost three months.
WFP said the pauses and corridors should allow emergency food to be safely delivered. “Food aid is the only real way for most people inside Gaza to eat,” it said in a statement.
It said a third of the population had not been eating for days, and 470,000 people in Gaza “are enduring famine-like conditions” that were leading to deaths.
WFP said more than 62,000 tonnes of food assistance was needed monthly to cover the entire Gaza population.
The agency noted that, on top of Sunday’s “pause” announcement, Israel had pledged to allow more trucks to enter Gaza with quicker clearances along with “assurances of no armed forces or shootings near convoys”.
“Together, we hope these measures will allow for a surge in urgently needed food assistance to reach hungry people without further delays,” it said.
“People are happy that large amounts of food aid will come into Gaza,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a business owner.
“We hope today marks a first step in ending this war that burned everything up.”
Hamas denounced the Israeli measures to allow more aid into Gaza, saying Israel was continuing its military offensive.
“What is happening isn’t a humanitarian truce,” said Hamas official Ali Baraka in a statement on Sunday.
Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir criticised the aid decision, saying it was made without his involvement. He called it a capitulation to Hamas’s campaign and repeated his call to choke off all aid to Gaza, conquer the territory and order Palestinians to leave.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond to a question about Ben-Gvir’s comments.
‘Dystopian landscape, starving civilians’
UN rights chief Volker Turk said Israel, as the occupying power in Gaza, was obliged to ensure sufficient food was provided to the population.
“Children are starving and dying in front of our eyes. Gaza is a dystopian landscape of deadly attacks and total destruction,” he said in a statement.
He criticised a US- and Israel-backed outfit, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), that in late May began distributing foodstuffs when UN-organised efforts were blocked.
Turk said the GHF’s “chaotic, militarised” distribution sites were “failing utterly to deliver humanitarian aid at the scope and scale needed”.
The GHF has faced fierce international criticism after Israeli fire killed nearly 800 aid seekers near distribution points since May 27.
A report by The Guardian revealed that food-deprived Palestinians in Gaza get as little as eight minutes to grab aid from GHF sites, which are located in evacuation zones, meaning that displaced Palestinians have to enter the areas they have previously been ordered to leave.
Yesterday alone, over 50 more Palestinians had been killed in Israeli strikes and shootings, some as they waited near aid distribution centres, the Palestinian civil defence agency said.
A number of Western and Arab governments carried out air drops in Gaza in 2024, when aid deliveries by land also faced Israeli restrictions, but many in the humanitarian community consider them ineffective.
“Air drops will not reverse the deepening starvation,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
“They are expensive, inefficient and can even kill starving civilians.”
Much of Gaza now lies in ruins after 15 months of fighting, which erupted on October 7, 2023 when thousands of Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to Israeli tallies, and abducting 251 hostages into Gaza.
The Israeli campaign in response has killed at least 59,733 Palestinians and destroyed much of the housing and infrastructure in the enclave, including the hospital system. The death toll is feared to be much higher due to thousands still missing under the rubble.
Activist boat Handala seized by Israel
Also on Sunday, Israeli forces seized and brought the pro-Palestinian activist boat Handala into the port of Ashdod on Sunday, after intercepting the vessel in international waters and detaining the crew, an AFP journalist saw.
Late last night, Israeli troops boarded a boat carrying activists from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition as it attempted to approach Gaza from the sea to challenge a naval blockade.
“Israeli forces illegally boarded ‘Handala’ in international waters, abducting 21 unarmed civilians,” the FFC said on X, sharing a video that showed purported Israeli soldiers taking away the activists.
“Demand your government end its complicity in Israeli war crimes, ensure the unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid, and call for the immediate release of all crew members,” the coalition said.
The live feed on the Handala boat belonging to the FFC showed Israeli troops boarding the vessel. The soldiers moved in as the boat approached Gaza and three live video feeds of the scene broadcasting online were cut minutes later.
On board were activists from 10 countries, including two French MPs from the left-wing France Unbowed party, Emma Fourreau and Gabrielle Cathala.
The activists include at least five citizens from the United States, three from France, two from Italy, Spain and Australia, and one each from the United Kingdom, Norway and Tunisia.
The legal rights centre Adalah told AFP its lawyers were in Ashdod and had been allowed to speak to 19 members of the 21-strong international crew, which included two French parliamentarians and two Al Jazeera journalists.
The remaining two of those detained were dual US and Israeli citizens and had been transferred to police custody, Adalah said.
“After 12 hours at sea, following the unlawful interception of the Handala, Israeli authorities confirmed the vessel’s arrival at Ashdod port,” said the group, set up to campaign for the rights of Israel’s Arab population.
“Adalah reiterates that the activists aboard the Handala were part of a peaceful civilian mission to break through Israel’s illegal blockade on Gaza.”