A spokesman for the European Commission, Balazs Ujvari, announced at midday on Friday 17 May that a new shipment of European Union humanitarian aid had left Cyprus for Gaza via the maritime corridor and was due to arrive in the afternoon. This is the first EU aid shipment to use the temporary American jetty moored on the coast of the Gaza Strip.
Thanks to the EU’s civil protection mechanism, Romania is sending more than 88,000 tins of food, with the European Commission covering the transport costs.
This new delivery is in addition to the more than 2,000 metric tonnes already delivered by EU humanitarian airlift flights and the €193 million in EU humanitarian funding allocated to Palestinians in need this year.
On the same day, the US army announced that the first shipment had begun to be unloaded from the jetty. According to the United States, around 500 tonnes of aid should arrive in the next few days, divided between several ships. Eventually, the operation could involve the equivalent of 150 lorries a day. Before the war, more than 500 lorries entered the Gaza Strip every day.
The EU has also announced the setting up of a logistics platform in Cyprus to help manage the additional flow of aid to Gaza.
Pointing out that the maritime corridor merely complements the existing land routes, the European Commission called on Israel in its press release to grant lasting humanitarian access to the Gazans by using new routes, such as the Erez crossing and the port of Ashdod.
Thirteen countries, including seven EU Member States (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea) reiterated their opposition to a large-scale military operation in Rafah “which would have catastrophic consequences for the civilian population”. These countries also urged the Israeli government to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip through all the relevant crossings, “including Rafah” which the Israeli army controls on the Palestinian side. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)