Gazans await US-promised humanitarian aid as it faces constant delays

Palestinians eagerly await the first international aid delivery to Gaza, on Friday, as Israeli forces pounded the enclave and warned of a ground invasion "soon", continuing its relentless air strikes for more than 13 days.

Israel's retaliatory attacks against Hamas raids, which killed 1,400 people in Israel, have resulted in more than 3,900 Palestinian martyrs while over 1,4000 have been injured. Additionally, one-third of homes have been made uninhabitable. 

The Rafah crossing in Egypt has been out of operation amid Israeli bombardments on Gaza, causing dwindling chances of aid entering the region.

The US Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues, David Satterfield, is negotiating aid delivery modalities with Israeli and Egyptian officials. Israel has demanded assurances that relief supplies cannot be seized by Hamas fighters.

The United Nations (UN) has called for aid to return to pre-conflict levels of 100 trucks a day. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres planned to visit the Rafah border crossing from Egypt to Gaza on Friday, a move that Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, told a rally in New York City showed that "his top priority is giving aid to the terrorists."

Citing a deepening humanitarian crisis, the international community has urged Israel to minimise civilian casualties and allow desperately needed aid to enter Gaza, but inside Israel, the drumbeat of war has only grown louder.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rallied frontline troops near Gaza Thursday, decked in body armour, vowing troops would "fight like lions" and "win with full force".

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant also toured the frontline, telling some of the tens of thousands of troops awaiting the ground invasion that new orders would come soon.

"Right now you see Gaza from afar, soon you will see it from the inside. The order will come soon," he said, predicting "difficult" battles ahead.

After returning from a solidarity visit to Israel, US President Joe Biden on Thursday called on Congress to provide more funding for the bereaved country's war effort. However, he also urged the implementation of a deal he brokered with Israel and Egypt to allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza from Friday.

"The people of Gaza urgently need food, water and medicine," Biden said in a televised address from the Oval Office on his return from Tel Aviv but near Egypt's border with Gaza, food, medicines, water purifiers and blankets have been piling up, with doubts growing that the Rafah crossing will open as planned.

"We hope there will be a crossing tomorrow," World Health Organization (WHO) boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday. "But for sure, based on the experience we had the last few days, we are also at the same time worried whether this will happen."

'Drop in the ocean'

In Geneva, Michael Ryan, WHO's emergencies director called the deal struck by Biden to allow in 20 trucks "a drop in the ocean of need". He said that "it should be 2,000 trucks."

The UN World Food Programme said it has 951 tonnes of food at or on the way to Rafah — enough to feed 488,000 people for one week. For now, it is not getting in, and the humanitarian situation in Gaza is worsening by the day.

In a grim sign of the depths of the crisis, the UN said that efforts to identify about 100 of the dead in Gaza had been abandoned. With refrigeration impossible, their corpses were buried in unmarked graves to prevent the risk of disease.

Entire city blocks have been levelled in Gaza, displacing more than one million of its 2.4 million people, the UN has said.

The Gazan interior ministry said several people sheltering at a church compound were killed and injured in an Israeli strike late Thursday.

According to AFP, the strike damaged the facade of the church and caused an adjacent building to collapse, adding that many injured people were evacuated to hospital.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) acknowledged a wall of the church had been damaged in one of its air strikes targeting a "command and control centre belonging to a Hamas terrorist."

"We are aware of reports on casualties. The incident is under review," a spokesperson told AFP.

Travel warnings

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan's King Abdullah II on Thursday condemned what they said was the "collective punishment" of Gazans. They also warned about the conflict spreading, with anger across the Middle East at Israel and its Western allies.

Sisi and Abdullah, whose countries were the first Arab states to make peace with Israel in 1979 and 1994, are seen as key mediators between Israel and the Palestinians.

Intensifying cross-border fire between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon has stoked fears of a potential second front.

The US, Britain and Germany on Thursday advised their citizens to leave Lebanon while flights were still available.

Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida called for protests at Israeli and US embassies, "to have them closed and their ambassadors expelled from all Arab and Muslim countries".

The Arab world has been united in anger and condemnation of Israel since a deadly strike hit Gaza's Al Ahli Hospital compound on Tuesday, killing 500 people — most of them children.

Both sides in the war have traded blame for the bloody carnage, but neither the provenance of the strike nor the death toll could immediately be independently verified.

Hamas accused Israel of hitting the hospital during its massive bombing campaign, and the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has put the death toll at 471, though that number is contested.

Israel has blamed a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket — a version of events backed by the US — and has pointed to the lack of a large impact crater typical of its air strikes, saying fuel from the errant rocket exploded.

The US intelligence community has estimated there were likely 100 to 300 people killed in the strike.