The Safeena mission, the first to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea, concluded successfully this Friday night following having unloaded without incident in the Strip the 200 tons of food transported from Cyprus by the ship Open Arms, of the Catalan maritime rescue NGO of the same name. “Everything is going very well, we are very happy. This was a pilot test and it worked,” said Gerard Canals, operations coordinator. The mission, promoted jointly by this humanitarian organization and World Central Kitchen (WCK), by Spanish chef José Andrés, was of tremendous “complexity,” as both entities have repeatedly warned in recent days. That difficulty, beyond diplomatic or meteorological obstacles, was in the way of delivering the cargo, given that Israel does not allow the occupants of the tugboat to establish contact with the Gazan population.
He Open Arms arrived south of the capital on Thursday night, following 72 hours of sailing from the Cypriot port of Larnaca, reopening an access route closed since 2007, when the Islamist movement Hamas took power in Gaza and Israel imposed a blockade by land, sea and air that hardened following the attack on October 7. The operation has been carried out with his approval.
This Friday morning the ship anchored approximately a mile away from the beaches of Gaza City, in the north of the enclave. The platform that transports the merchandise, a total of 130 pallets of non-perishable food, was towed by two semi-rigid boats from the ship – to which it has been attached throughout the journey – to the breakwater built by the workers in the WCK Strip. At 3:10 p.m. local time (2:10 p.m. Spanish peninsular time), the barge was moored to this kind of dock, which has been erected in record time with the rubble of the buildings destroyed by the Israeli bombings.
The operators have moved the pallets from the barge to the breakwater with the help of a crane truck located on the edge of the dock. From there it has been moving the shipment to the NGO’s trucks, which will distribute it to the 60 kitchens they have in different parts of Gaza and to other food distribution points. In total, there are 200 tons of flour, rice, lentils, chickpeas, tuna and other basic foods that will become a million meals, according to chef José Andrés.
The unloading work has passed without incident and “quite quickly,” according to the crew members. However, the waves and nightfall slowed down operations slightly in the last hours. Around 11 at night, ten o’clock in mainland Spain, the last pallet has touched dry land and the platform has been towed back to the Open Arms. This will sail back during the night of Friday to Saturday, concluding the pilot test of the operation. “We had a plan of how everything should go; Before leaving, the authorities had given us in great detail what to do, and everything was carried out almost on time,” Canals described in a telephone conversation.
With a bottleneck in entry by land and the limitations of parachute shipping, the opening of this maritime humanitarian corridor will not generate a substantial change in the situation in the Strip, where more than half a million people are “on the brink of famine,” according to the United Nations. The 200 tons of aid that has been brought to the beaches of Gaza are equivalent to the load of 12 trucks. The usual flow before the war was regarding 500 a day.
Update from Gaza🎥 WCK is offloading almost 200 tons of rice, flour, proteins & more that arrived by sea earlier today. At the same time this shipment is transported ashore, our second vessel is preparing to set sail from Cyprus with hundreds more tons of food. #ChefsForThePeople pic.twitter.com/cHacgMJQ6c
— World Central Kitchen (@WCKitchen) March 15, 2024
Yes, it will alleviate the extreme situation, thanks also to a second ship that is being stowed in the port of Larnaca with 400 more tons of food aid, in a new operation also promoted by WCK and the Governments of Jordan, Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates.
The mission depends on what happens in the coming weeks on the ground and in the offices. A second ceasefire agreement would significantly increase it. A forced evacuation of the population of Rafah – the small border area with Egypt where the majority of the 2.3 million Gazans take refuge – to invade it would have unpredictable consequences.
Just this Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved plans to carry out “military operations” in Rafah following rejecting Hamas’ latest truce offer to exchange hostages for prisoners, which he described as “not yet realistic.” The statement from his office points out that the army “is preparing operationally and to evacuate the population” displaced there, but does not specify where or when. The decision to send a delegation to Qatar (one of the three mediating countries, along with Egypt and the United States) to continue the talks suggests that the announcement is partly a pressure negotiating strategy.
Since he announced it a month ago, there has not been a day in which Netanyahu does not insist that it will happen, sooner or later, “despite international pressure,” which he boasts of blocking. “Even those who believe we are delaying will soon see that we will catch up with everyone,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Wednesday.
Israel assures that the armed wing of Hamas still has four battalions in Rafah and refusing to destroy them would mean “losing the war.” It aims to first concentrate a good part of the 1.4 million people crowded there (many are in shelters or tents and all eat less than necessary) in “humanitarian islands.” It was announced this week by the Israeli military spokesman, Daniel Hagari, without going into details.
The United States, the great ally that provides Israel with weapons and financing and has guaranteed it a veto in the UN Security Council for five months, has also been qualifying its criticism of the Rafah invasion. Last week, its president, Joe Biden, described it as a “red line.” But then he clarified that “there are no red lines” that would mean cutting off “the entire supply of weapons.” “I will never abandon Israel,” he added. White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan clarified that Biden’s red line was to invade Rafah without a clear and reliable plan to guarantee the safety of civilians. It is a difference that Netanyahu did not miss and highlighted recently in an interview.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, also spoke this Friday in Austria in the same sense: the problem is rather where and how to take civilians. “We have to see a clear and actionable plan, not only to get civilians out of harm’s way, but also to make sure that, once they are out of harm’s way, they receive appropriate care, with shelter, food, medicine, clothing… Not yet “We have seen that plan,” he noted.
The statements show that one of Washington’s main concerns is humanitarian aid. The Israeli military spokesman has recently said that his country (which has been using hunger as a weapon of war) will now “flood” Gaza with humanitarian aid. This week, the military began a pilot project of six UN trucks entering directly into the north, where the situation is most extreme. There are seven crossings with Gaza: Rafah, which borders Egypt, and another six with Israel. Only the first and one of the Israeli ones are partially open since the beginning of the conflict.
For this reason, and with half a million people on the brink of famine and the first deaths (especially children) due to malnutrition or dehydration, the European Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, warned this Thursday that humanitarian aid shipments by air (for weeks) and by sea (with the route that Open Arms has just inaugurated) “are not enough.” Israel, he added, must open other land crossings with Gaza that it keeps closed. The amount of food or medicine that can be delivered by road is much greater than that dropped by parachute or arrived by sea. It is also cheaper and faster and less logistically complicated.
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