Israel announces 'tactical pause' in fighting to allow more aid into southern Gaza

16 June 2024, 07:47

Israel has announced a "tactical pause" in the fighting in southern Gaza to allow more aid to be brought into the territory.

The IDF said the pause would start at 8am (6am UK time) and last until 7pm (5pm UK time). They said it would continue every day until further notice.

It comes after the military announced on Saturday that eight Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Gaza.

The IDF said the pause would allow aid trucks to get to the Kerem Shalom crossing, the main entry point for incoming aid, which is controlled by Israel and travel safely to the Salah a-Din highway, a main north-south road, to deliver supplies to other parts of Gaza.

The pause has suffered from a bottleneck since Israeli troops moved into Rafah, the south Gaza city, in early May.

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Israel said the pause was being coordinated with the UN and other international agencies.

Israel's war with Hamas, which they launched after the terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 hostages on October 7, has plunged much of Gaza into a humanitarian crisis.

Hamas-controlled local authorities say that around 37,000 people have died in the territory over the past eight months. Many more have been injured and hundreds of thousands more are on the brink of famine.

The amount of aid that reaches Gaza has gone down significantly in recent weeks.

From May 6 until June 6, the UN received an average of 68 trucks of aid a day. That was down from 168 a day in April and far below the 500 trucks a day that aid groups say are needed.

Meanwhile months of ceasefire negotiations have failed to find common ground between Israeli and Hamas.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Hamas proposed changes to a US-backed plan, some of which he said were "workable" and some not, without elaborating.

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Cogat, the Israeli military body that oversees aid distribution in Gaza, says there are no restrictions on the entry of trucks. It says more than 8,600 trucks of all kinds, both aid and commercial, entered Gaza from all crossings from May 2 to June 13, an average of 201 a day. But much of that aid has piled up at the crossings and not reached its final destination.

A spokesman for Cogat, Shimon Freedman, said it was the UN's fault that its cargos stacked up on the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom. He said the agencies have "fundamental logistical problems that they have not fixed", especially a lack of trucks.

The UN denies such allegations. It says the fighting between Israel and Hamas often makes it too dangerous for UN trucks inside Gaza to travel to Kerem Shalom, which is right next to Israel's border.

It also says the pace of deliveries has been slowed because the Israeli military must authorize drivers to travel to the site, a system Israel says was designed for the drivers' safety. Due to a lack of security, aid trucks in some cases have also been looted by crowds as they moved along Gaza's roads.

The new arrangement aims to reduce the need for co-ordinating deliveries by providing an 11-hour uninterrupted window each day for trucks to move in and out of the crossing.

It was not clear whether the army would provide security to protect the aid trucks as they move along the highway.