Tel Aviv, Israel
Reuters
Israel will open a new land crossing into the Gaza Strip designed mainly to facilitate deliveries to Palestinians of aid from overseas or neighbouring Jordan, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday.
After a cross-border attack by Gaza’s ruling Hamas Islamists on 7th October, Israel went to war and cut off supplies from or through its territory to the impoverished coastal enclave.
People chase a convoy of aid trucks driving into Gaza from Rafah crossing, on 9th April, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in this screen grab taken from video. PICTURE: Reuters TV/via Reuters
A spiralling humanitarian crisis has drawn pressure on Israel from its Western and Arab partners to do more to facilitate the entry of aid, after months in which it sought to shift the burden to Egypt, which also has a border with Gaza.
Israel has gradually reopened two established cargo crossings and created a new crossing on its border, and last week announced it would admit Gaza-bound aid shipments at its southern port of Ashdod.
Briefing reporters, Gallant said a new crossing point would be created on the northern part of the Gaza border to reduce the time taken to truck in aid from Ashdod, 40 kilometres away.
An aide said the crossing point would be between the Israeli village of Zikim and the Palestinian village of As-Siafa.
Gallant said the new crossing point would boost the delivery of aid brought in overland from Jordan, to Israel’s east.
“These breakthroughs have a direct impact on the flow of aid – we plan to flood Gaza with aid,” he said. “It will also streamline security checks and strengthen our work with international partners.”
There has been disagreement between Israeli and UN counts for the aid reaching Gaza, most of whose 2.3 million people are homeless, parts of which face famine and where civilian infrastructure is devastated and disease widespread.
Israel has also helped set up a maritime corridor for direct deliveries of aid to Gaza by sea and opened its airspace to foreign planes that have parachuted in aid for Palestinians.
Palestinian group Hamas’ top leader, Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press conference in Tehran, Iran, on 26th March, 2024. PICTURE: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters/File photo
Meanwhile, Hamas said three sons of leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.
The Israeli military confirmed carrying out the attack, describing the three sons as operatives in the Hamas armed wing.
The three sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammad – were killed when the car they were driving in was bombed in Gaza‘s Al-Shati camp, Hamas said. Four of Haniyeh’s grandchildren, three girls and a boy, were also killed in the attack, Hamas said.
Asked about the four grandchildren killed in the airstrike, the Israeli military said there was “no information on that right now”.
Haniyeh, based abroad in Qatar, has been the tough-talking face of Hamas’ international diplomacy as war with Israel has raged on in Gaza where his family home was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike back in November.
“The blood of my sons is not dearer than the blood of our people,” Haniyeh, 61, who has 13 sons and daughters according to Hamas sources, told pan-Arab Al Jazeera TV.
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The three sons and four grandchildren were making family visits during the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday in Shati, their home refugee camp in Gaza City, according to relatives.
Hamas said on Tuesday it was studying an Israeli ceasefire proposal in the more than six-month-old Gaza war but that it was “intransigent” and met none of the Palestinian demands.
“Our demands are clear and specific and we will not make concessions on them. The enemy will be delusional if it thinks that targeting my sons, at the climax of the negotiations and before the movement sends its response, will push Hamas to change its position,” Haniyeh said.
In the seventh month of a war in which Israel’s air and ground offensive has devastated Gaza, Hamas wants an end to Israeli military operations and a withdrawal from the enclave, and permission for displaced Palestinians to return home.
Haniyeh’s eldest son confirmed in a Facebook post that his three brothers were killed. “Thanks to God who honoured us by the martyrdom of my brothers, Hazem, Amir and Mohammad and their children,” wrote Abdel-Salam Haniyeh.
Appointed to the militant group’s top job in 2017, Haniyeh has moved between Turkey and Qatar’s capital Doha, avoiding Israeli-imposed travel restrictions in blockaded Gaza and enabling him to act as a negotiator in the latest ceasefire negotiations or communicate with Hamas’ main ally Iran.
Israel regards the entire Hamas leadership as terrorists, accusing Haniyeh and other leaders of continuing to “pull the strings of the Hamas terror organisation”.
But how much Haniyeh knew about the 7th October cross-border attack on Israel by Gaza-based militants beforehand is not clear. The attack plan, drawn up by the Hamas military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials abroad seemed shocked by its timing and scale.
