The first aid trucks have begun entering Gaza after 78 days of blockade.
The United Nations said that nine trucks were given permission to enter on Monday 19 May, of which five were actually able to cross into the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, the UN said it had received approval for “around 100” more trucks to go into Gaza.
That is still well below the 500 trucks per day that the UN says crossed into the Palestinian territory before the war started in October 2023, and are necessary to meet its needs.
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The five trucks that entered on Monday remained near the Kerem Shalom crossing overnight, according to the spokesperson for the UN’s aid coordination office OCHA, Jens Laerke.
It is not clear whether they subsequently departed for distribution centres within Gaza, or if more trucks have since entered Gaza.
Sky News understands that Israel has forbidden aid agencies from storing food and medication at warehouses, requiring that all food entering Gaza be taken directly to its final location.
In a video statement, posted to social media on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had decided to allow “minimal” aid into the Gaza Strip because “we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons”.
What aid is in the trucks?
The UN says that the trucks contain food supplements for babies and young children, who are among the groups most at risk of starvation.
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Last week, a UN-backed report warned that, if food availability does not improve, 14,100 children aged under five will experience severe acute malnutrition, the most severe form of hunger, over the next year.
At a clinic in central Gaza, one medical worker told Sky News that nearly half of all under-fives presenting at the centre have acute or severe acute malnutrition – compared to around one in 20 before Israel implemented its total blockade on 2 March.
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Nahed Abu Eyada, whose primary health clinic in Deir Al Balah screens around 20 young children each day, said that the situation is “very miserable”.
“Before the closure, we had one case per day of acute malnutrition, and one per week of severe malnutrition,” she said. “Now, from 20 children we have 10 acute [cases] and one or two severe [cases].”
The map below shows the location of sites offering nutritional services to vulnerable groups, where the aid might be distributed.
A new aid system is to be implemented next week
From 24 May, however, Israel says that aid distribution will come under the control of private military contractors operating in areas secured by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Under the new, US-backed system, aid will be distributed from four militarised compounds, three of which are in the far south of the Gaza Strip and one of which is in central Gaza.
In November, the UN estimated that there were around 445,000 people in northern Gaza. In January, following the implementation of a ceasefire, the UN said that an additional 376,000 additional people had moved to the region.
It is unclear how many have since left, but satellite imagery captured on Friday 16 May shows no major reduction in the number of tents in Gaza City compared to late March.
The location of the new aid distribution sites means these people will eventually need to move south to obtain aid.
Israeli authorities have been pressing for Palestinians to evacuate south, issuing several evacuation notices in recent days ordering Palestinians to relocate to Al Mawasi – a crowded, sandy strip of coastline in southern Gaza.
Israel says the plan is intended to prevent Hamas from accessing aid and using this to bolster its rule in Gaza.
OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke dismissed claims that theft of aid was of significant scale and said that the new aid distribution plan “appears to be a deliberate attempt to weaponise the aid”.
“The problem is the blockage of hundreds of aid trucks that should go into the Gaza Strip every single day,” he said.
“That is the root cause of the humanitarian crisis.”
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
