Israel under pressure to let more aid into Gaza as hostage talks continue

Israel’s leaders were under renewed pressure to allow more aid into Gaza on Wednesday after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told Benjamin Netanyahu to “accelerate and sustain improvements” seen during recent days in the amount of humanitarian assistance reaching the territory.

Humanitarian agencies say that though the number of lorries entering Gaza after being vetted by Israel has increased significantly, these still deliver only a fraction of what is needed.

Blinken met Netanyahu for two hours in Jerusalem, discussing the need to sustain humanitarian deliveries to Gaza; hostage and ceasefire negotiations; and efforts to “ensure a lasting, sustainable peace in the region”, a reference to broader talks the US has been holding with Saudi Arabia about a possible normalisation of relations with Israel, as well as the prospects for establishing a Palestinian state, which the Israeli prime minister adamantly opposes. Blinken also restated Washington’s determined opposition to Israel’s planned offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Blinken later travelled to the port of Ashdod to highlight some of the improvements in aid delivery in recent days. He said the port had been open since February to US flour in transit to Gaza and was now open to other kinds of humanitarian aid: “We’re now seeing a real flow of assistance that is going to the people in Gaza.”

He also said that a convoy of aid trucks from Jordan had passed through the Erez crossing for the first time on Wednesday. “That’s very important because that’s direct access to the north of Gaza,” he added.

Blinken also said that a sea corridor, involving a US-made floating dock and pier to deliver ship-borne humanitarian aid, was “probably a week away from being operational”. “So the progress is real, but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated, it needs to be sustained,” he said.

Earlier this week, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said there had been incremental progress toward averting “an entirely preventable, human-made famine” in the northern Gaza Strip, but called on Israel to do more. Humanitarian agencies say they still face bureaucratic obstacles as well as grave logistical difficulties inside Gaza. Some aid officials have disputed Israeli methods of counting trucks and their loads entering the territory.

Jordan’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said Israeli settlers attacked two of its humanitarian aid convoys as they made their way towards Gaza through the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The lorries, carrying food, flour and other aid, managed to continue on their journey and reach their destination, the ministry added in a statement. Honenu, an Israeli legal aid agency, said four men who had “blocked aid trucks going to Gaza” near the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim were arrested by Israeli police.

Col Moshe Tetro, head of Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Administration for Gaza, said he hoped the Erez crossing would be open every day, and help reach a target of 500 aid trucks entering Gaza daily. That would be in line with prewar supplies entering the territory and far more than it has received over the last seven months.

There is growing speculation that Israel will soon launch a long-threatened assault into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians displaced from their homes farther north are sheltering. The plan has drawn intense opposition from Israel’s allies, including the US, which says the overcrowded conditions could lead to thousands of civilian casualties as well as further disrupting aid deliveries entering via Egypt.

The secretary of state said on Wednesday that the US could not support a Rafah operation without a humanitarian plan, and it had not seen one.

Israel is the final stop on Blinken’s Middle East tour, his seventh visit to the region since war broke out last October.

According to a UN update published on Wednesday, Israeli bombardment from the air, land and sea continues across much of Gaza, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement and destruction of houses and other civilian infrastructure.

Attention in Israel has focused on the prospect of the release of surviving hostages held in Gaza if a ceasefire deal is reached with Hamas.

In a ceasefire at the end of November, 100 of about 240 hostages were freed in exchange for about 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails, but negotiations for further exchanges collapsed after a week. Israel estimates that 129 hostages remain unreturned, of whom 34 are believed to be dead.

Talks this week in Cairo are widely viewed as the last opportunity to salvage a diplomatic solution to free the Israeli hostages and a pause or end to the war after multiple rounds of talks over the past five months. A Hamas delegation left the Egyptian capital on Monday, saying they would return again with a written response to Israel’s latest ceasefire proposal.

Blinken has repeatedly urged Hamas to accept an “extraordinarily generous” truce deal that would see 33 hostages released in exchange for a larger number of Palestinian prisoners, discussions on allowing displaced Palestinians to return to north Gaza and a second phase of a truce that would involve a “period of sustained calm”.

A senior official for Hamas said the group was still studying the proposed deal but accused Blinken of failing to respect both sides and described Israel as the real obstacle. “Blinken’s comments contradict reality,” Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

Blinken, who also privately met the families of hostages, told them that freeing them was “at the heart of everything we’re trying to do”.

“There is a very strong proposal on the table right now. Hamas needs to say yes, and needs to get this done,” Blinken told protesters calling for the hostages’ release after he met the families.

Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who also met Blinken during his visit, said Netanyahu “doesn’t have any political excuse not to move to a deal for the release of the hostages”. “He has a majority in the nation, he has a majority in the Knesset, and if needed, I’ll make sure he has a majority in the government,” he said on X.

Various members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, mainly from the religious nationalist partners he depends on for the survival of his coalition government, have criticised the negotiations.

Orit Strook, a member of the Religious Zionist party and a minister, described the emerging hostage deal as “awful” in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio. “Soldiers who left everything behind and went out to fight for the objectives that the government set – and we’re throwing that into the trash in order to now save 22 people or 33 people or I don’t know how many? A government of that kind has no right to exist,” Strook said.

The son of one hostage told the same network that “extremists” in Israel were preventing a deal. “Forces that are so extreme and so deranged that have emerged in this country – it’s simply a nightmare,” Matti Danzig said. “We’re their hostages and my father is Hamas’s hostage.”