Name: Israel says it will open Gaza aid corridors after international pressure | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-07-27T17:23:36.000Z
Duration: 15 min 6 s
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In the last hour, the Israeli military has announced a pause in fighting in three areas for humanitarian purposes.

Now, this is the scene looking into Gaza from Israel.

The IDF says starting today between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. local time, there will be a pause in military activity in al-Mawasi, Deir al-Bala and Gaza City every day until further notice.

It is to allow the safe passage of United Nations and humanitarian aid organization convoys.

Now, Egyptian TV has shown these pictures of aid trucks lining up at the border before moving off, driving towards the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli move, which includes opening so-called humanitarian corridors, comes after mounting international pressure and warnings of mass starvation of Palestinians in the territory.

The Israeli military says its planes also dropped seven packages of aid into Gaza earlier this morning, containing flour, sugar and canned food.

The IDF released these pictures of that, but the aid agencies say the method is inefficient, dangerous and a distraction.

Israeli troops have boarded a boat that was trying to bring aid to Gaza by sea.

The pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla coalition said the vessel, Handala, was intercepted in international waters.

Video footage showed activists on board with their hands up as soldiers took control before the feed cut out.

Let's go live to our Middle East correspondent Amir Nader, who's in Jerusalem, and our Gaza correspondent Rushdie Abaluf, who joins us from Istanbul.

Amir, if I can start with you, what do we know about this breaking news of these pauses in fighting in some areas of Gaza?

Well, the areas that they've announced are areas that the Israeli military has previously told Palestinians to go to, areas such as al-Mawasi, which is a huge tent encampment home to thousands of Palestinians who've been displaced there throughout the war.

So these are already supposed to be areas that are safer areas than elsewhere in Gaza, where the fighting is supposed to be happening at a higher intensity.

I think the most significant element of this statement is the announcement around humanitarian convoys.

Humanitarian agencies have said one of the issues that they face while trying to bring aid into the Gaza Strip is that their convoys are often attacked by the Israeli military, and then they struggle to get permissions to deliver that aid.

When they do get it, it's unsafe for the civilians that crowd around it.

We saw deadly incidents this weekend and last weekend.

So if there's going to be a safe route from the borders of Gaza through to the humanitarian areas, such as al-Mawasi and the areas where Palestinians are, that could indeed actually have a significant effect on the ability of Palestinians to access aid in Gaza.

Yes, it is interesting the statement from the IDF says this was coordinated with the United Nations.

We've also seen early this morning airdrops by the Israelis.

I mean, I think critics might say that that will do more to sort of have a comms benefit for Israel than an actual impact on the humanitarian situation on the ground.

What humanitarian agencies say Palestinians need is for the Gaza Strip to be flooded with convoys of aid trucks, not seven packages dropped from the air.

Obviously, Jordan is looking at doing some airdrops too, with coordination with the UK after approval from Israel.

But humanitarian aid agencies say that airdrops are not the solution.

They just need to allow many more trucks to be delivered inside the Gaza Strip.

Amir, you mentioned the communication side of things.

How much do you think what Israel is doing over the last 24 hours is because of that mounting international pressure and the pictures that all of us have seen coming out of Gaza?

I think it's under huge pressure internationally amongst its allies, amongst the international community, the aid community.

And clearly it wants to be seen to respond.

What we're trying to analyze is whether the responses that it's announcing will actually have the kind of effect that the humanitarian community are calling for.

In the statement that Israel put out yesterday evening, they actually denied that there's a starvation crisis in Gaza.

And they said that they want to enforce these changes in order to refute the false claim of deliberate starvation.

So we're in this weird position where Israel is saying it's going to make some changes to the delivery of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, but at the same time saying that there isn't a crisis.

Let's go to our Gaza correspondent Rushdie Abaluf, who is in Istanbul.

Rushdie, I know you have your family, some of it in Gaza, and you talk to a lot of people there.

What is the situation like at the moment?

Well, look, people hoped for a better permanent solution, but in general they welcomed.

There are very few people who have access to the social media.

We're posting all night and this morning that this is a good move.

The airdrop last night was a chaotic scene.

I have seen videos and pictures of people fighting each other, punching each other to take some of the food.

This is just to show you how desperate the people who are starving for the food are.

Five, six, I think seven packages were counted in the northwest of the Gaza area, called Asudania, near the Gaza city, where we believe maybe 200,000 people are living in tents in the area.

Most of them were evacuated from northern Gaza and eastern Gaza, where there is active Israeli military operation in the area.

So all eyes are on the border and people are waiting for the food to come in, because what has been allowed in the last week, which is considered the most difficult week since the beginning of the war, people are waiting for the aid to be in and to be distributed, not to be sent to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where people walk for hours sometimes to get to a very dangerous area.

People were all the time demanding that food should be handed over to the UN agencies and to be distributed to the people.

Well, I think it is very early to judge whether the amount allowed will change the crisis, but it's a good move considered by all Palestinians.

Yes, because the aid agencies say they have those trucks at the border and we've seen pictures of them moving from Egypt, but it is that issue that we mentioned with Amir.

It's about the safety of getting those supplies in.

Yes, because about 60% of Gaza now are under Israeli security control, especially the area where the crossings that allow food in, like Kerim Shalom crossing in Rafah.

The entire city of Rafah is under Israeli control.

You know, there is active troops inside it and there is fighting every day in that area.

So the trucks, the humanitarian aid agencies are always concerned about the safety of the drivers in the trucks.

They need multiple coordination to enter Rafah first and then to go to the border and collect it.

They need another coordination to go back to the areas and distribute it.

We understand that they might allow food from three different crossings today, one in the south, one in the north and one in the middle.

So what the agencies in Gaza are saying is they need 500 to 600 trucks every day for at least a month to ease some of the crisis related to the food and water.

Most important, not only food, they need medicine for the hospitals and they need fuel to be able to run the essential operations in the hospitals in Gaza.

I know this is a difficult question, Rushdie.

Is there any optimism amongst the people that you speak to on a daily basis there?

Well, it's hard to find any level of optimism in Gaza, especially after the, you know, about 48 hours ago when the American envoy Steve Whitkoff announced that the Americans and the Israelis are walking away from the, you know, ceasefire talks in Doha.

People were hoping that after months of suffering, the ceasefire will come into place.

The people enjoy a relative calm back in January.

For about 57 days, Israel used to allow hundreds of trucks every day.

The markets were somehow stable and people could start, you know, at least to feel a little bit of relief.

Optimism is something very hard to find in Gaza, but there is always hope that this step will be like a small step considered by them, but could lead to a bigger step or a permanent ceasefire that end the war.

Rushdie, thank you very much for your time.

Rushdie, talking to us from Istanbul, of course, because Israel does not allow the BBC or other international media into the territory at the moment.

Our world news correspondent, Jo Inwood, now looks at the aid situation and a warning.

It does contain distressing images in this report.

Zainab Abu Hale was just six months old when her parents buried her.

Killed not by the violence of war, but by the malnutrition it has brought to Gaza.

She got also bacterial infection and sepsis, so she was unable to swallow and she was dead yesterday.

Came to the hospital as a body because of severe starvation.

There is growing international awareness and anger at the scale of the humanitarian crisis.

Of the nearly 60,000 people who have now been killed since the start of the war, 127 died from malnutrition.

That figure increased by five in just one day, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

To try to tackle the crisis, a series of airdrops have been announced.

The UK has said it is coordinating with Jordan to take part, as it did last year.

In the last round of aid flights, the US Air Force said each plane carried around 12,600 meals.

This means it would take 160 flights every day to provide just one meal a day to the population of Gaza.

Now, the combined transport fleet of the UAE and Jordanian air forces who would carry out the drops is only around 20 aircraft.

Airdrops could deliver just a tiny fraction of the aid that trucks could.

And that has led to this blunt assessment from a leading aid organisation.

There's an obvious solution in Gaza, which is to open the borders and allow agencies like the IRC, like our partners in the UN and humanitarian organisations to bring aid in and to distribute it, as we would do in any other crisis zone.

Airdrops fundamentally are a grotesque distraction from that priority.

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Israel says it will open Gaza aid corridors after international pressure | BBC News

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