Israel eases Gaza aid curbs, hoping to defuse hunger outcry
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The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday suspended some military operations against Hamas to facilitate the movement of UN relief convoys, and restored electricity supplies to a desalination plant in Gaza for the first time since March.
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The UN World Food Program has warned for weeks that the entire population of 2.1 million people in the Gaza Strip faces crisis levels of food insecurity. Scores of aid groups say starvation is fast spreading.
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That's seen world anger toward Israel's government on the rise amid increasing reports and images of emaciated babies, children crammed into soup queues, and men tussling over bags of flour.
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz spoke by phone on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing 'deep concern about the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza' and urging 'further substantial steps,' according to a readout from his office.
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While continuing to deny accusations that it's deliberately starving Gazans, Israel has now begun parachuting in food supplies. That's a delivery mechanism tried by several foreign air forces a year ago but abandoned, at the time, amid concerns about scale and safety.
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'There's a campaign full of lies under way' that's created 'a mistaken impression of famine in Gaza,' Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, told Tel Aviv radio station 103 FM. 'Therefore the cabinet decided yesterday to bring in aid, in order to show the world that we are heeding the claims, even if we disagree about the facts.'
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Sunday's decision was announced by the military without comment from Netanyahu or Defense Minister Israel Katz. It marked a de facto reversal of Israel's cut-off of UN-led humanitarian relief in March after the previous Gaza ceasefire expired, a tactic Netanyahu aides had said would deprive Hamas of a means of controlling the populace while feeding its own fighters.
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Mahmoud Mardawi, a senior Hamas official, described the about-face on Telegram as 'not a solution, but rather, a belated and twisted confession of a crime having been committed.'
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