Egypt Pushes for Deliveries of Aid to Gaza

A digger arrives to start removing rubble following an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)
A digger arrives to start removing rubble following an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)
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Egypt Pushes for Deliveries of Aid to Gaza

A digger arrives to start removing rubble following an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)
A digger arrives to start removing rubble following an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called on Thursday for humanitarian relief to be provided to Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip.

Israel's massive bombardment and imposition of a total siege on Gaza has caused alarm in Egypt, which shares a border with the south of the Palestinian enclave and controls the main exit point for the 2.3 million residents living there.

Egypt has said it wants to facilitate the delivery of aid through its Rafah crossing, but has also signaled its rejection of Gaza residents being forced south across the border.

In a phone call with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, al-Sisi "stressed the need to guarantee the regularity of humanitarian services and relief to the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip," the Egyptian president’s office said in a statement.

Sisi also informed Sunak of Egypt's "continuing efforts to push for the pursuit of calm and utmost restraint to prevent sliding into bloodshed, the price of which will be paid by more innocent people, and whose consequences will extend to the entire region", the statement said.

Israel, which is retaliating for a deadly incursion by Hamas gunmen into Israel, said on Thursday there would be no humanitarian break to its siege of Gaza until all its hostages were freed.

Egypt also said on Thursday it was directing international aid for Gaza to Al Arish airport in the north of the Sinai Peninsula.

The nearby Rafah crossing between Sinai and Gaza remained open, the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that Egypt had asked Israel to avoid targeting the Palestinian side of the crossing after strikes that prevented normal operations there.

 



Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

 Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
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Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

 Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)

Israel’s military admitted Saturday it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles,” with Hamas condemning it as a “war crime” that killed at least one person.

The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

Israeli troops launched an offensive there on March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.

Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists,” the military said in a statement to AFP.

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops... The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”

The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.

It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks,” and condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes.”

The day after the incident, Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sultan who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.

On Friday, it reported finding the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles—an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle—and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal.”

Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against Civil Defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah.”

“The targeted killing of rescue workers—who are protected under international humanitarian law—constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime,” he said.

Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, “Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and other civilians.”

“Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed,” he said in a statement.

“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”