Washington DC, US
Reuters
The US on Thursday called on both Israel and Hamas to ensure that aid bound for civilians in Gaza is not disrupted, after a shipment from Jordan was attacked by Israeli settlers and subsequently diverted by Palestinian militants.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken viewed the aid on Tuesday just before it departed from the headquarters of the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization in Amman bound for the newly opened crossing into Gaza at Erez.
A worker unloads humanitarian aid, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, near the Erez Crossing point in northern Gaza, on 1st May, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
The visit was part of a US push to increase the aid getting to civilians in Gaza amid warnings of imminent famine after nearly seven months of war stemming from Hamas’s 7th October attacks in southern Israel.
Before the shipment reached the crossing, however, Jordan said it was attacked by Israeli settlers.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Blinken raised the incident with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday, and credited Israel for arresting three people involved in the attack.
“That’s the step that they ought to take whenever there are attacks on aid convoys,” Miller said. “Furthermore, they ought to prevent these attacks from happening in the first place.”
The same aid convoy was later transferred to a humanitarian aid group to be distributed inside Gaza but was “intercepted and diverted” by Hamas, Miller said, adding that he believed the United Nations either had or was in the process of recovering the aid.
“It was an unacceptable act by Hamas to divert this aid to begin with, to seize this aid,” Miller said.
“If there’s one thing that Hamas could do to jeopardize the shipment of aid, it would be diverting it for their own use, rather than allowing it to go to the innocent civilians that need it. So they certainly should refrain from doing that in the future,” Miller added.
Meanwhile, top Israeli ministers were discussing on Thursday what a government source said was a Gaza truce proposal to free some hostages held by Hamas, as well as prospects for an army sweep of the southern tip of the enclave packed with displaced Palestinians.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet meeting was slated to be followed by a meeting of the wider security cabinet, the source said. Israel does not generally publish information on sessions of the two groups.
Palestinian children walk past a house damaged in an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on 1st May, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Hatem Khaled/File photo
Israel awaits a response from Hamas on the latest ceasefire offer, presented by Egyptian mediators, which would bring about the release of some of the 133 hostages still held by the Islamist group since the 7th October cross-border attack that triggered the Gaza war.
One of the hostages, Dror Or, 48, from the hard-hit southern Israeli community of Kibbutz Beri, was confirmed by Israel late on Thursday to have been killed and his body was being held in Gaza. Or’s wife was also killed in the Hamas attack and two of his children were taken hostage and later released during a brief November truce.
Throughout the course of the war, Israeli authorities have declared a number of captives still in Gaza dead in absentia.
Past ceasefire efforts stumbled over a Hamas demand for a commitment to end the war by Israel, which insists on eventually resuming the now almost seven-month-old offensive to dismantle the faction.
Israel has also described as imminent a long-threatened push into Rafah, on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, which it says is the last bastion of Hamas. Rafah is the temporary home of around one million displaced Palestinians, whose fate worries the international community.
While Israel says it will work to ensure the safe evacuation of civilians from Rafah, visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday he had yet to see such a plan.
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In other news related to the Israel-Hamas conflict, a UN report released on Thursday said rebuilding Gaza’s shattered homes will take at least until 2040 but could drag on for many decades.
Nearly seven months of Israeli bombardment have caused billions of dollars in damage, leaving many of the crowded strip’s high-rise concrete buildings reduced to heaps, with a UN official referring to a “moonscape” of destruction.
Palestinian data shows that about 80,000 homes have been destroyed in a conflict triggered by Hamas fighters’ deadly attacks on southern Israel on 7th October. Israeli strikes have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Palestinian woman Asmaa Al-Belbasi, making her way back to her shelter after buying bread from recently reopened Al-Sharq bakery, walks past the ruins of a house destroyed during Israel’s military offensive, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City on 24th April, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Mahmoud Issa/File photo
In a best-case scenario in which construction materials are delivered five times as fast as in the last Gaza crisis in 2021, rebuilding destroyed homes could be done by 2040, a building assessment said.
But the UN Development Programme assessment notes that Gaza would need “approximately 80 years to restore all the fully destroyed housing units” under a scenario assuming the pace of reconstruction follows the trend of several previous Gaza conflicts.
A separate report based on satellite images analysed by the United Nations showed that 85.8 per cent of schools in Gaza had suffered some level of damage since 7th October. Over 70 per cent of schools will require major or full reconstruction, the UN statement added.
The UNDP assessment makes a series of projections on the war’s socioeconomic impact based on the duration of the current conflict, projecting decades of suffering.
“Unprecedented levels of human losses, capital destruction, and the steep rise in poverty in such a short period of time will precipitate a serious development crisis that jeopardises the future of generations to come,” said UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner in a statement.
In a scenario where the war lasts nine months, poverty is set to increase from 38.8 per cent of Gaza’s population at the end of 2023 to 60.7 per cent, dragging a large portion of the middle class below the poverty line, the report said.
– Additional reporting by JASPER WARD
