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The United States will set up a temporary port in Gaza for the entry of humanitarian aid, as announced by President Joe Biden in the State of the Union address before both houses of Congress. Israel “fully supports” the plan and will coordinate with Washington to put it into practice, a senior Israeli official said Thursday. The spokesman for the Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres, Stéphane Dujarric, has welcomed the plan, but has recalled that the needs remain enormous and that the international community should focus on strengthening access to aid by land, more effective both by cost as well as volume.
The arrival of more aid to the Strip is urgent. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, has claimed that Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system as part of a broader “famine campaign” in its war against Hamas. “Israel is not only denying and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, it is also destroying the food system,” Fakhri told the UN Human Rights Council. “Israel has mounted a famine campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he added.
Spain will contribute another 20 million euros to the budget of the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, announced this Thursday. In a press conference after his interview in Madrid with the head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, Albares indicated that this contribution will come from the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (AECID) and that it will serve to “support the organization in its crucial role in Gaza, and to support the six million Palestinians in the region.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Israeli forces “will continue to operate against Hamas throughout the Gaza Strip, including Rafah, the militia’s last stronghold.” “Whoever tells us not to act in Rafah is telling us to lose the war and that will not happen.”
The leader of the Houthi movement, Abdelmalek al Huti, has assured that the United States and United Kingdom offensive against Yemen “has failed” in its objective of stopping the insurgents’ attacks against ships sailing in the Red Sea and linked to Israel.