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In a significant U-turn, Israel’s war cabinet has approved a US request to allow the daily entry of two fuel lorries into Gaza.
Previously, Israel had linked the entry of fuel to the release by Hamas of some of the 238 hostages seized from southern Israel last month.
Defending the change of policy, national security council chair, Tzachi Hanegbi, said the fuel was necessary in order to operate Gaza’s sewage treatment system, which is on the verge of collapse.
Mr Hanegbi said this would have risked the mass spread of disease in Gaza, which would impact both the Palestinian civilians in the enclave but also the thousands of Israeli troops operating there.
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“If plague were to break out, we’d have to stop the war,” he said, adding that the IDF would not be able to continue operating amid such a dire humanitarian crisis and that the international outcry would reach new heights. He stressed that Israeli intelligence chiefs approved the new policy, which only amounts to 2-4 per cent of the daily amount of fuel entering Gaza before the war.
Hamas urgently needs more fuel to provide ventilation and lighting for its vast tunnel network but Israeli officials promised the fuel will be monitored to make sure it does not end up in the hands of militants.
The move was criticised by right-wing ministers. Transport minister Miri Regev, from prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the war cabinet does not have the authority to approve the introduction of fuel into Gaza.
Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called the decision ‘puzzling,’ and demanded that Mr Netanyahu “stop this scandal immediately and prevent the introduction of fuel.” He described the decision as ‘illegal’ because it contradicted Israeli policy and he demanded that Mr Netanyahu change the composition of the war cabinet to include the heads of all coalition parties.
Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, stressed that Israel was not changing its strategy, but was providing a specific, one-off, response to allow the IDF to continue fighting. He promised that the new policy will be discussed by the wider political-security cabinet.
UN aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday due to shortages of fuel and a communications shutdown, deepening the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops battled Hamas militants in the enclave.
The United Nations World Food Programme warned that Gaza faces the danger of widespread hunger as nearly the entire population is in desperate need of food assistance, with only 10 per cent of necessary food supplies entering the coastal Strip since the beginning of the conflict.
“With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” said WFP executive director Cindy McCain. “There is no way to meet current hunger needs with one operational border crossing,” she added.
The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 12,000 residents have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign on October 7th after 3,000 heavily-armed gunmen stormed across the border, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking some 240 hostage.
Tens of thousands of Israelis are expected to participate in a rally in Jerusalem on Saturday, marking the culmination of a march from Tel Aviv by relatives of the hostages. They are demanding the government agree to a deal to bring some 50 women and children captives back home in return for a limited ceasefire and Israel freeing roughly the same number of Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons.
One of the hostages is Irish, Israeli national Emily Hand, who turned nine on Friday.
With the war about to enter its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.
Palestinian news agency Wafa said a number of Palestinians were killed and others injured in an Israeli strike that hit a group of displaced people near the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt – the transit point for aid.
Al Jazeera TV cited sources as saying that nine people were killed in the strike. Al Jazeera also said that at least 18 Palestinians were killed after an Israeli strike hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
There was no comment from Israel on the reported incidents and Reuters could not verify them.
Israel’s military, which has concentrated its assault on northern Gaza, said its troops and war planes were keeping up pressure on Friday. It claimed to have taken control of an Islamic Jihad commander’s stronghold overnight, and to have killed Hamas fighters inside a school where they found a large number of weapons.
Earlier, Israel said its troops had found a tunnel shaft used by Hamas at al-Shifa hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The hospital, packed with patients and displaced people and struggling to keep operating, has become a major focus of global concern. Israel says Hamas has stored weapons and ammunition and is holding hostages in a network of tunnels under hospitals like Shifa, using patients and people taking shelter there as human shields. Hamas denies this.
Israel has vowed to wipe out the militant group. Whole neighbourhoods of Gaza have been flattened in air and artillery strikes, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, and the humanitarian situation is catastrophic, aid agencies say.
At the Indonesian Hospital in North Gaza, people wounded in Israeli strikes lay in the hallways.
“Yesterday we went to the mosque to pray at sunset. We kneeled the first time and suddenly ... I was under a load of rocks and other people were under the rubble,” said one young boy.
“There were cut-up hands and legs and we didn’t know if someone would come and save us. The civil defence came.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, quoting Palestinian data, said Israeli attacks had destroyed or damaged at least 45 per cent of Gaza’s housing units.
The United Nations said there would be no cross-border aid operation on Friday due to fuel shortages and a communication shutdown. For a second consecutive day on Thursday no aid trucks arrived in Gaza due to lack of fuel for distributing relief.
An Israeli official said later on Friday that Israel’s war cabinet had approved letting in two fuel trucks a day into Gaza to help meet UN needs, following a US request.
Nearly the entire Gazan population is in desperate need of food assistance, said WFP executive director Cindy McCain.
“With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” she said in a statement.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff said Israel was close to destroying Hamas’ military system in the north of the coastal enclave of 2.3 million people.
The army released a video it said showed a tunnel entrance in an outdoor area of al-Shifa hospital.
The video, which Reuters news agency said it could not verify, showed a deep hole in the ground, littered with concrete and wood rubble and sand. It appeared the area had been excavated. A bulldozer appeared in the background.
The army said its troops also found a vehicle in the hospital containing a large number of weapons.
Hamas said on Thursday that US claims that the group uses Shifa for military purposes was “a repetition of a blatantly false narrative”.
Israeli officials had said Hamas held some of the 240 hostages taken by gunmen on October 7th in the hospital complex.
On Friday, the Israeli military said soldiers retrieved the body of a female soldier, Noa Marciano. It said she had been held captive in a building near Shifa. The Israeli military on Tuesday confirmed the death of the soldier after Hamas issued a video of her alive followed by images of what the Palestinian militants said was her body after she was killed in an Israeli air strike on November 9th.
On Thursday, troops said they had recovered the body of another woman hostage, Judith Weiss, also in a building near Shifa.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hamas’ Al-Quds Brigades said they had engaged Israeli forces for several hours in the city of Jenin overnight.
Israel’s military said war planes struck militants in Jenin who had opened fire on Israeli soldiers and at least five militants were killed.
At least 178 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th. The violence there has underscored fears that the territory, seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War, could spiral out of control in tandem with the conflict in Gaza. - Additional reporting: agencies
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