Aid agencies and the United Nations are calling for Israel to open more crossings into Gaza to allow “thousands of trucks” to enter the devastated territory every day.
Preparations are being made to allow convoys through the southern Rafah crossing with Egypt on Thursday, the first such access through the critical entry point since May last year.
However, humanitarian officials are also calling for other entry points to be opened, including a crossing to northern Gaza, which would allow vital supplies to reach hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have travelled across the devastated territory in recent days to reach their shattered homes.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s most senior relief coordinator, called on Israel to facilitate the “massive surge of humanitarian aid – on which so many lives depend, and on which the world has insisted.”
“We need more crossings open and a genuine, practical, problem-solving approach to removing remaining obstacles. Throughout this crisis, we have insisted that withholding aid from civilians is not a bargaining chip. Facilitation of aid is a legal obligation,” Fletcher said.
Aid agencies say thousands of tonnes of aid, including food and medical supplies, has been loaded on to trucks waiting in Egypt or stockpiled elsewhere in the region.
“We have the supplies, the tools and the skills … We just need the access,” said one international aid worker, recently returned from Gaza.
The fragile ceasefire in Gaza had faced its first test when Israel on Tuesday accused Hamas of failing to comply with the deal signed last week by delaying the return the bodies of hostages. In retaliation, Israel said it would cut the number of trucks it would allow into Gaza to 300, half the total agreed in the ceasefire deal, and postpone indefinitely the opening of the Rafah crossing.
Hours later, Hamas handed over the remains of three more hostages to the Red Cross, bringing to eight the number of bodies transferred since the US-brokered ceasefire took hold, and leaving 21 to be accounted for.
The militant Islamist organisation said the delays were due to difficulties locating burial sites amid the swaths of rubble left by the two-year conflict. A fourth body transferred by Hamas was found not to be that of a hostage.
Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported that heavy equipment needed for repairing damaged infrastructure would be permitted to enter Gaza and Palestinians who had left the territory during the war would be allowed back for the first time. Others would be allowed to leave through the Rafah crossing, subject to Israel’s security approval.
Palestinians awaiting medical evacuation said they had not yet received notification from the World Health Organization to prepare for travel.
Rafah has been shut since it was seized by Israeli forces in May 2024, limiting entry into Gaza from Israel. Israel has repeatedly blocked aid from entering Gaza during the conflict, prompting accusations it has used starvation as a weapon of war. A famine was declared in parts of the territory in August.
The EU said on Wednesday it was on standby to deploy a longstanding humanitarian mission, known as a EUBam (EU Border Assistance Missions), at the Rafah crossing if conditions on the ground improved.
Humanitarian officials in Gaza City said on Wednesday assistance was desperately needed, with hundreds of thousands of people without clean water, food and other essentials and many more suffering greatly.
Though aid was supposed to start flowing over the weekend, on Monday crossings from Israel were closed to allow the hostage transfer and Palestinian prisoners to reach Gaza and then for national holidays.
Tess Ingram of Unicef, speaking from southern Gaza, said: “We had heard that Sunday would be the first day of a big scale-up of aid coming in but what we’ve seen so far is in very sharp contrast to how high and desperate the needs are.
“People are not sure when they are next going to get any water. There is not enough food. We had 45 outpatient nutrition clinics open in August, now there are just seven.”
Trump’s proposed plan calls for “full aid” to enter Gaza. Later phases of the plan call for Hamas to disarm and give up all power, which it has so far refused to do, instead launching a security crackdown to reassert its authority in Gaza through public executions and clashes with local clans.
Longer-term elements include how Gaza will be governed and the makeup of an international stabilisation force but are yet to be fully discussed.
On Monday, Israelis celebrated the return of the last 20 living hostages in Gaza and Palestinians rejoiced at Israel’s release of about 2,000 prisoners and detainees as part of the ceasefire’s first phase. Negotiations are under way on a second phase, which will have to resolve multiple thorny issues.
In a demonstration of the political challenges facing the truce, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister and an opponent of the ceasefire plan, said on X that the aid delivery was a “disgrace”.
“Nazi terrorism understands only force and the only way to solve problems with it is to wipe it off the face of the earth,” he added, accusing Hamas of lies and abuse over the return of hostages’ bodies.
The Hostages Family Forum, a group representing many of the hostages’ families, said the three dead hostages whose remains were identified on Tuesday night were Uriel Baruch, Tamir Nimrodi and Eitan Levi.
Baruch was abducted from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 that triggered the war in Gaza. Nimrodi, who had been serving with the Israeli defence ministry body that controls entry points into Gaza, was taken by militants from the Erez border crossing. The forum said Levi was abducted while driving a friend to a kibbutz during the Hamas attack.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is overseeing the transfer of remains, said on Monday that the retrieval was a “massive challenge” given the difficulties of finding bodies in Gaza’s rubble, and could take days or weeks.
