At the start of winter, the situation in the Gaza Strip, already catastrophic, continues to worsen. In addition to the almost daily deaths of civilians caused by Israeli air raids, six infants have died of cold in recent weeks, the BBC reported. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in December 2024, only 70 humanitarian aid trucks were able to enter the Palestinian enclave, populated by more than 2 million inhabitants, each day. Before the start of the war, launched in October 2023, in response to the terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel, an average of 500 trucks of goods entered Gaza every day. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court accused the Jewish state of using “starvation as a means of waging war”.
In response to these criticisms, the Israeli army invited the international press to visit, Thursday, December 19, 2024, the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing point, the main entry point for humanitarian aid, in the south of the territory. Apart from these carefully supervised reports, foreign media are prohibited from entering the coastal strip. On this occasion, military communicators led reporters to three large hangars where dozens of pallets of humanitarian aid are stored. Bags of flour, blankets, cans of lentils, and even a few wheelchairs, which could fill “a hundred trucks” and would not have moved “for months”assures David Baruch, one of the spokespersons for the Israeli army, during the press conference organized at Kerem Shalom.
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