The humanitarian lifeline into Gaza remained closed on Friday despite a personal visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and an agreement to open it brokered by Joe Biden, as Israel continued to pummel the enclave with airstrikes.
The failure to lift the total Israeli blockade further endangered Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, with the UN forced in many cases to reduce the water ration to one litre a person a day for all uses, compared with the minimum international standard of 15 litres.
Late on Friday, a US mother and daughter who were seized during the Hamas attack on Israel and held hostage in Gaza were released after Qatar brokered negotiations with the militant group.
Natalie Raanan, 17, and her mother, Judith, who also hold Israeli citizenship, were transferred into Egypt, and then returned to Israel where they were reunited with their relatives.
In a statement, Joe Biden said he was “overjoyed” that the two would soon be back with their family, and pledged to continue his efforts to secure the release of the hostages.
Earlier in the day Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, appeared to suggest that Israel did not intend to reoccupy the territory it left in 2005.
Addressing lawmakers, Gallant said that first, airstrikes and “maneuvring” would root out Hamas. That would be followed by a lower-intensity fight to defeat remaining pockets of resistance. Finally, a new “security regime” would be introduced to coincide with “the removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip”, Gallant said.
Gallant did not say who would run Gaza if Hamas was toppled or what that new security regime would entail.
Biden had touted Israel’s agreement to a limited opening of the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian-Gaza border as the main achievement of his one-day trip to Israel on Wednesday. The deal covered a relatively tiny aid delivery of 20 lorryloads of supplies, less than 5% of daily deliveries before the latest conflict, but even that did not reach Gaza.
The US president had said that another priority of his Israel trip was to ensure that several hundred Palestinian-Americans trapped in Gaza would be able to leave. But with Rafah closed, none have so far been able to escape the increasingly desperate conditions inside the enclave.
Aid officials said it was taking longer than expected for Egyptian workers to repair the road into Gaza, which had suffered bomb damage, but the Egyptian foreign ministry denied Cairo was responsible for the continued blockade.
In a statement on social media, the ministry blamed the media for “holding Egypt responsible for the crossing closure despite Israeli targeted attacks and refusal of aid entry and recently insinuating Egypt responsibility for obstructing third-country nationals’ exit”.
The ministry said: “Rafah crossing is open and Egypt is not responsible for obstructing third-country nationals’ exit.”
In earlier talks with US officials, however, Cairo had made the delivery of humanitarian aid a precondition for allowing Palestinian-Americans to cross into Egypt.
Guterres called for significant deliveries of aid to be let through and for security checks to be speeded up.
“These trucks are not just trucks, they are a lifeline. They are the difference between life and death for so many people in Gaza,” he said. However, the UN secretary general flew back to Cairo on Friday with the crossing still closed.
On Saturday, he is expected to attend a conference convened by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, with Arab, European and African leaders focused on building pressure for a ceasefire and humanitarian relief.
“Not even the symbolic 20 trucks have entered Gaza. Needs are equivalent to thousands of truckloads of relief,” Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, wrote on social media. He argued the US, the UK, Germany and the EU could provide the security checks on the border that Israel is demanding.
“It is a question of will,” he added. “But, each hour without ceasefire means more dead children.”
The Israeli military said it had hit 100 “operational targets” overnight, claiming the strikes were aimed at “destroying tunnel shafts, munitions warehouses and dozens of operational headquarters”.
A Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that was providing shelter for hundreds of displaced Palestinians was struck, according to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and Palestinian health officials. Gaza’s Hamas-run government said 18 Christian Palestinians were killed, bringing the Palestinian toll in Gaza over the past 13 days to more than 3,800.
Airstrikes continued on southern Gaza, where Palestinians from the north had been told by Israel to seek shelter.
“Rescue teams, primarily from the Palestinian Civil Defense, are struggling to carry out their mission amid continuous airstrikes, severe shortages of fuel to run vehicles and equipment, and with limited or no connection to mobile networks,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its daily bulletin.
“Hospitals are on the brink and overcrowded with patients, many awaiting treatment. OCHA is concerned that 9,000 cancer patients lack adequate care because of conditions in Gaza’s only chemotherapy hospital.”
A million people in Gaza have been forced from their homes, many fleeing to southern Gaza on the order of the Israeli army. More than half are crammed into shelters, where the water ration has dwindled to a litre a person a day, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa).
“Unrwa shelters are overcrowded and have very limited supplies of food, hygiene and cleaning supplies and potable water. The dire conditions, compounded by trauma due to the war, have started to fuel tensions among the IDPs [internally displaced people] in the shelters,” the agency reported, adding that there was anecdotal evidence that some displaced Palestinians were leaving the shelters and returning home because of the dire conditions.
The prospect of even worse bloodshed is likely with a planned Israeli ground assault intended to destroy Hamas entirely, 16 years after the militant group seized full control of Gaza.
The UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said: “Any further escalation or even continuation of military activities will just be catastrophic for the people of Gaza.”
There were more signs on Friday of the potential for the Gaza conflict to spread. Israel evacuated Kiryat Shmona, a town of more than 20,000 residents near the Lebanese border, after days of cross-border artillery exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah forces.
Twenty-eight Israeli border settlements had already been emptied, and the evacuation of Kiryat Shmona suggests that Israel expects the border clashes to get worse. Hezbollah and its Iranian backers have threatened intervention if the Israeli assault on Gaza escalates.
Tensions are also high in the West Bank. The Palestinian health ministry said 13 people, including five children, had been killed in an Israeli assault, including an airstrike, on the Nur Shams refugee camp outside the town of Tulkarm. And Israeli forces sent a convoy of armoured cars to carry out arrests in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority.
The conflict also demonstrated its potential for polarising societies around the world. London’s Metropolitan police reported that antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes in London had soared since the start of the present conflict.
The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, met President Sisi in Cairo, agreeing with the Egyptian leader on the necessity of preventing the spread of the conflict. Sunak also held talks with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in Cairo on Friday, issuing a joint condemnation of Hamas while calling for all parties to protect civilians.
Abbas will take part in President Sisi’s peace summit on Saturday. Leaders from Kuwait, Bahrain, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and EU have also said they will attend. The UK will be represented by the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, but the US was not planning to send a cabinet-level official. It was unclear on Friday night whether the participants would be able to agree on a joint statement.
Cleverly will emphasise the UK’s desire to prevent the regional spread of the conflict and mitigate the threat from Hamas.