First ship with food aid arrives in Gaza

A humanitarian aid ship arrived in Gaza on Friday for the first time since the war began, a first step in a fledgling maritime operation to deliver more aid to hungry Palestinians as aid groups say Israel is restricting more efficient deliveries by road.

The ship, the Open Arms, was towing a barge loaded with about 200 tonnes of rice, flour, lentils and canned tuna, beef and chicken, supplied by the charity World Central Kitchen, from Cyprus across the Mediterranean. It is the first ship authorized to deliver aid to Gaza since 2005, according to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive branch, who has described the operation as a pilot project for a so-called maritime corridor for supplies to the Gaza Strip. area.

Linda Roth, a spokeswoman for World Central Kitchen, said the Open Arms had docked at a newly built jetty on the Gaza coast and workers began moving the food onto the land. It remained unclear how the food would be distributed among Palestinian civilians.

The food on the ships is desperately needed in Gaza, where officials say about 20 children have already died from malnutrition and hundreds of thousands of others are “one step away from famine,” the United Nations said. But delivering aid by sea is not nearly as efficient as delivering aid by land, and humanitarian groups have been calling on Israel for months to open more land crossings, ease restrictions on convoys and address their operational problems.

“For large-scale relief efforts, there is no meaningful substitute for the many land routes and entry points from Israel into Gaza,” two U.N. aid officials, Sigrid Kaag and Jorge Moreira da Silva, said in a statement this week. Still, they welcomed the opening of a maritime corridor, given that much more humanitarian aid is still needed in Gaza.

Israel, which tightened its already restrictive blockade of Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, has said throughout the war that it was committed to allowing as much aid as possible into Gaza. The country has blamed the delays on UN personnel and logistics.

This week, amid mounting international pressure to allow more aid, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited northern Gaza and reviewed preparations for the new maritime humanitarian route. Mr Gallant – who in October ordered Gaza to have “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” – called aid a “central issue” in a Defense Department statement about his trip.

But safely distributing food where it’s needed — amid insecurity, lawlessness and roads damaged by Israeli attacks — could face many of the same obstacles as U.N. aid groups that were forced to halt deliveries in northern Gaza last month to suspend.

José Andrés, the famed Spanish-American chef who founded the World Central Kitchen, acknowledged the challenges in an interview with The New York Times last week, but added: “It’s worth trying the impossible to feed the people of Gaza.”

The group said a second ship carrying 300 tons of aid was loaded in Cyprus on Thursday, but it was not clear when it would leave.

Gaya Gupta, Monika Pronczuk, Michael Levenson And Christina Morales reporting contributed.