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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said Wednesday that the Egyptian government and the country’s Red Crescent will oversee the delivery of aid to the besieged Gaza Strip in coordination with the UN.
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Tons of aid supplies from Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and the World Health Organization (WHO) have arrived at the Rafah border crossing in recent days.
Humanitarian aid has been stalled without access to the Palestinian coastal enclave from the Egyptian side. Shoukry said, “Cairo’s goal is to speed up the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.”
The Egyptian foreign minister welcomed a “positive development” as today the Israeli war cabinet decided to allow basic humanitarian aid from Egypt to enter the Gaza Strip.
They’ll let in 20 trucks of humanitarian aid. Over 100 trucks have waited at the Rafah crossing for days. Over 2 million people in Gaza. 20 trucks is a drop in the bucket. Egypt releases readout of humanitarian aid call between el-Sisi and Biden https://t.co/UFkGUnq1ko
— Steve Kastenbaum (@SKastenbaum)
October 19, 2023
For his part, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said earlier Wednesday that Egypt firmly supports the Palestinian people and strongly rejects any attempt to transfer them to Egypt’s adjacent Sinai Peninsula.
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) launched a large-scale attack on Israel on October 7 with thousands of rockets on irregular Jewish settler settlements around Gaza. Hamas said it was acting in the face of repeated Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine.
Israel responded in retaliation with massive air strikes on Gaza and punitive measures, including a siege of the enclave, with cuts in the supply of water, electricity, fuel and other necessities.
The continued Israeli bombardment against the Palestinian territory, now in its 12th day, has killed nearly 3,500 Palestinians and injured another 12,000.
