First ship carrying humanitarian aid arrives in Gaza

A humanitarian aid ship has arrived off the Gaza Strip for the first time since the start of the war, a first step in a fledgling maritime operation to bring more aid to hungry Palestinians as aid groups say that Israel is restricting more efficient deliveries by road.

The ship, the Open Arms, towed a barge loaded with more than 200 tons of rice, flour, lentils and canned tuna, beef and chicken, supplied by the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity, across the Mediterranean from Cyprus. It is the first vessel authorised to deliver aid to Gaza since 2005, according to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, who has described the operation as a pilot project for a so-called maritime corridor for supplies to the territory.

Linda Roth, a spokeswoman for World Central Kitchen, said that the Open Arms had docked Friday at a newly built jetty on the Gaza coast and that workers were beginning to move the food on to land. It remained unclear how the food would be distributed to Palestinian civilians.

A second cargo of food aid was ready to depart by sea from Cyprus to Gaza on Saturday, the island’s president Nikos Christodoulides said.

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The second ship, with 240 tons of aid, was moored at Larnaca port awaiting a signal to sail.

WCK, which arranged the aid mission with the UAE and Spanish charity Open Arms with support from the Cypriot government, said the new shipment included pallets of canned goods and bulk products.

WCK said the second boat also had two forklifts and a crane to assist with future maritime deliveries to Gaza. A crew ship would accompany the cargo boat with eight workers to operate the machinery and offload the aid, it said. In the first mission, the charity offloaded aid onto a makeshift jetty that WCK built from the rubble of destroyed buildings.

The food on the ships is desperately needed in Gaza, where officials say around two dozen children have already died from malnutrition, and hundreds of thousands of others are “one step away from famine”, according to the United Nations. But delivering aid by sea is much less efficient than delivering it by land, and humanitarian groups have called on Israel for months to open more land crossings, ease restrictions on convoys and address their operational concerns.

“For aid delivery at scale there is no meaningful substitute to the many land routes and entry points from Israel into Gaza”, two UN aid officials, Sigrid Kaag and Jorge Moreira da Silva, said in a statement this week. Still, they welcomed the opening of a maritime corridor, given how much more humanitarian assistance is needed in Gaza.

Israel, which tightened an already restrictive blockade on Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7th attack, has said throughout the war that it is committed to allowing as much aid into Gaza as possible. It has blamed delays on UN staffing and logistics.

This week, under growing international pressure to allow more aid in, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, visited northern Gaza and viewed preparations for the new maritime humanitarian route. Gallant – who ordered in October that Gaza should receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” – called aid a “central issue” in a statement the defence ministry issued about his trip.

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But safely distributing food where it is needed – amid insecurity, lawlessness and roads damaged by Israeli strikes – could face many of the same hurdles as UN aid groups that were forced to suspend deliveries in northern Gaza last month.

José Andrés, the renowned Spanish-American chef who founded WCK, acknowledged the challenges in an interview with The New York Times this month but added: “It’s worth trying the impossible to feed the people of Gaza.”– The New York Times/Reuters