As winter begins, the already dire situation in the Gaza Strip continues to worsen. In addition to the almost daily civilian casualties caused by Israeli air strikes, six infants have frozen to death in recent weeks, reported the BBC. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), only 70 truckloads of humanitarian aid per day were able to enter Gaza, whose population is over 2 million people, in December 2024. Before the start of the war, which began in October 2023 in response to a terrorist attack in southern Israel by Hamas, an average of 500 truckloads of goods entered Gaza every day. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court accused Israel of using the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

In response to these accusations, the Israeli army invited international media to visit the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing – the main entry point for humanitarian aid in the territory’s south – on Thursday, December 19, 2024. Apart from these carefully supervised visits, foreign media are forbidden to enter Gaza. On this occasion, military spokespeople took reporters to three vast warehouses where dozens of pallets of humanitarian aid were stored, including sacks of flour, blankets, canned lentils, and even a few wheelchairs. There was enough to fill “a hundred trucks,” said Israeli army spokesperson David Baruch at the press conference in Kerem Shalom, but it has not been moved “for months.”

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