Israel has been working on bringing in aid to Gaza from Cyprus by ship for three months, a senior Israeli official tells The Times of Israel, as a vessel meant to inaugurate the sea route waits to set sail from Larnaca.
The official says that Israel understood that it needs international legitimacy to prosecute the campaign against Hamas, and that “international legitimacy is mainly the humanitarian issue.”
Sea routes were an attractive option, because it allows aid to be delivered to Gaza without requiring land crossings from Israel, severing links to the Strip.
“There was one condition – that everything is inspected, supervised, that we control it,” says the official. “That we can say from a security perspective, all sorts of things that we don’t want are not coming in.”
Representatives from the Foreign Ministry and COGAT flew to Larnaca to examine the port and work out with Cyprus how exactly the shipments would be secured.
“We were in touch with several countries that wanted to do this, in our neighborhood, the US, also Gulf states,” says the official.
The cargo will be examined by the Shin Bet and Israeli customs officials in Larnaca, then will sail for Gaza. For now, the ships will dock at a temporary pier being built south of Gaza City by the World Central Kitchen.
The WCK will unload the cargo, place it in temporary storage facilities it is building, and then will send it to Gazan civilians.
The IDF will have troops at a remove from the WKC facility, to ensure there are no attacks on the aid workers, or looting of the goods.
The aid convoys will initially go to northern Gaza to make sure the mechanism works, then will also reach the south as the operation begins running more smoothly.
Most aid currently gets in the south via land crossings at Kerem Shalom and the Rafah gateway into Egypt, but the official says use of those crossings will be constricted once fighting begins in Rafah. That means Israel will need to open crossings directly into the northern Gaza Strip, says the official.
The IDF is not organizing its own convoys, the official stressed, because it needs to use troops for combat missions.
“We want to do the maximum possible, with minimum manpower, to allow maximum humanitarian aid,” the official explains.
The official adds that there will be no limits imposed by Israel on the amount of food, medicine, and water that comes in.
Israel is confident that once the sea lane begins working properly, the chances of a melee around shipments like a deadly incident last month will decline dramatically.
“The more the population sees that there is a system, a mechanism, they will understand, then people won’t loot and fight over the aid,” says the official.
As for the US-built pier announced by President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address last week, the details are still being worked out, says the official.
“There is an IDF-slash-Centcom group examining how exactly it will work,” the official says.