JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said on Monday that it had paused operations during daylight hours in parts of the southern Gaza Strip, as a new policy announced a day earlier appeared to take hold amid cautious hopes that it would allow more aid to reach residents of the beleaguered territory.
Aid workers said they hoped that the daily pause in the Israeli offensive would remove one of several obstacles to delivering aid to areas in central and southern Gaza from Kerem Shalom, an important border crossing between Israel and Gaza. Despite the pause, aid agencies warned that other restrictions on movement, as well as lawlessness in the territory, made food distribution difficult.
The policy applies only to a 7-mile stretch of road in southern Gaza, and not to areas in central Gaza to which hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have fled since the Rafah invasion began.
When Israel invaded Rafah in early May, the move led to the closure of the lone supply route between Egypt and Gaza, at Rafah, and it hindered aid groups’ ability to distribute food and other aid delivered from Israel and bound for southern and central Gaza.
Though aid groups had stockpiled food and other supplies before the Israeli push into Rafah, six weeks of fighting there have prompted concerns about hunger in southern Gaza, even as fears of a famine ebbed in the territory’s north.
With those stockpiles dwindling, “maybe for a couple of weeks they’ll have enough food, but if we cannot have access and sustain that, then that’s going to be a big problem,” said Carl Skau, the deputy director of the World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations that distributes food in Gaza. Food supplies in southern Gaza were “more stabilized a month ago, but we are really concerned now,” said Skau, who visited Gaza last week.
The closure of the Rafah border and fighting around it have forced aid groups and commercial vendors to route more of their convoys through Israel, where trucks enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing point. Once the food is inside Gaza, humanitarian organizations transfer it to their own vehicles and distribute it. Those groups say that Israel does too little to ensure the safety of those delivering aid, citing attacks on aid convoys and workers, including Israeli airstrikes.
Israel regularly says that there are no limits on the amount of aid it allows to enter Gaza and blames disorganized aid groups — as well as theft by Hamas — for the failure to move food from Israeli to Palestinian control.
“We think their main problem is logistical, and they’re not doing enough to overcome those logistical problems,” said Shimon Freedman, a spokesperson for COGAT, the branch of the Israeli defense ministry that coordinates with aid groups.
But prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have accused Israeli leaders of restricting aid delivery and are seeking their arrest on charges including the use of starvation as a weapon of war. And aid groups said the fighting near the Kerem Shalom crossing made it even harder for aid groups to collect the food from the border and then distribute it onward through Gaza.
“Before Rafah, we had free access to Kerem Shalom basically all day, every day,” said Scott Anderson, the deputy Gaza director for UNRWA, the lead United Nations agency for Palestinians. “Now we still have access, it’s just a little more nuanced and difficult to get there,” he added, citing frequent gunfire and explosions in areas traversed by aid trucks, including three times recently when convoys recently came within roughly 100 yards of fighting.
“What we had asked for was windows to access Kerem Shalom without having to coordinate so closely with the IDF — to be able to come and go, and the trucks to come and go, with more freedom,” said Anderson, using the initials of the Israel Defense Forces.
That led to the new Israeli policy of avoiding combat in daylight hours.
The military said Monday that it had killed more than 500 combatants in Rafah, severely reducing the capacity of two of Hamas’ four battalions in the city. The remaining two battalions were operating at a “medium level,” the military said.
Though humanitarian groups welcomed the pause, they said that far more still needed to be done.
Israeli strikes have damaged supply routes in Gaza, hindering the passage of convoys, and crowds of desperate Palestinians often intercept trucks in search of food. Cash shortages have prevented many civilians from buying food brought into Gaza by commercial convoys.
And as summer approaches, there is a rising need for more clean drinking water, Anderson said.
In recent weeks, Israel has allowed aid groups far greater access to northern Gaza, where fears of famine were once highest, opening up more access points to the north. But aid groups say that sanitation and health care are still highly inadequate in northern Gaza, even if food supplies have improved.
“We were driving through rivers of sewage everywhere,” said Skau, the WFP official.
“We really flooded the place with ready-to-eat food commodities,” he added. “But this progress needs to be sustained and frankly we need to diversify.”
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