First Gaza food aid boat departs Cyprus on new maritime corridor
The initiative is separate from a US military plan to build a floating pier on the coast to increase aid deliveries.
A small barge carrying food aid set off from Cyprus toward the Gaza Strip overnight on Tuesday, the first test of a new maritime corridor seen as one way to counter the hunger crisis unfolding in the Palestinian enclave five months into Israel’s war against Hamas.
The aid shipment was organised by aid group World Central Kitchen, with a crew from Spanish charity Open Arms and backing from the United Arab Emirates. It is separate from an initiative announced last week by President Joe Biden, who said he had directed the US military to build a floating pier on the Gaza coast to help overcome obstacles to trucking aid over land.
Aid workers have said that the maritime deliveries won’t come close to meeting the overwhelming level of need in Gaza, especially in the north of the strip, where a vicious cycle of Israeli military operations, the breakdown of order and rising desperation have throttled aid provision.
The Palestinian health ministry says 27 people in Gaza, most of them children, have died from malnutrition and dehydration in recent days.
The nearly 200 tonnes of flour, rice, lentils and canned food on the World Central Kitchen barge, which is being pulled across choppy waters by a small tugboat, is enough for nearly half a million meals. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Palestinians remain in northern Gaza.
Questions remained about how the delivery will be received in Gaza, whose only port was put out of service by Israeli airstrikes in the early days of the war, and how it can be distributed safely amid growing desperation among the strip’s 2.2 million people. Authorities in Gaza said Tuesday that several people were killed and dozens wounded while they waited to receive food aid in the north of the enclave, the latest such incident in recent weeks.
The vessel will take two to three days to cross the roughly 200 nautical miles between Cyprus and northern Gaza.
The group, founded by Spanish-American celebrity chef Jose Andres, said its aim was to establish “a maritime highway of boats and barges stocked with millions of meals continuously headed towards Gaza”.
US officials have said it would take about 60 days to build the pier for the larger aid deliveries coordinated by Washington.
People familiar with the plan have said that if it works, 200 truckloads worth of aid could arrive every day. That is the minimum the UN considers necessary to feed the population, but would still be a stopgap measure compared with supplies before the war when Gazans relied on about 500 truckloads a day.
The World Central Kitchen operation aims to get food into Gaza sooner, but at least initially on a much smaller scale. It said it had another 500 tonnes of food in Cyprus and more ships ready to transport it.
The charity has already delivered 35 million meals to Gaza over land and through airdrops by the Jordanian air force. It has said that it is coordinating the sea operation with Israel and unnamed partners in Gaza that are helping it build a jetty to unload the aid.
“We may fail, but the biggest failure will be not trying!” Andres wrote on X. “We could bring millions of meals a day...The people of the north will be fed!”
UN agencies and charities suspended food-delivery missions to the north in February after an aid convoy was hit by Israeli naval gunfire. Israel said its forces were targeting Hamas infrastructure.
Since then, the World Food Program has tried to resume operations and on Tuesday said it had succeeded in getting a convoy to deliver enough food for about 25,000 people in Gaza City.
The Wall Street Journal
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