A first boat loaded with 200 tonnes of food aid was making slow progress towards the Gaza Strip on Thursday as efforts grew to bring more humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian territory besieged by Israel.
The main UN aid agency in Gaza said an Israeli strike a day earlier hit one of its warehouses in the southern city of Rafah, killing an employee, although Israel later said a Hamas militant was killed in the rocket strike.
Donor nations, aid agencies and charities pushed on with efforts to rush food to the territory of 2.4 million people, where famine looms after more than five months of war.
Mediation efforts have so far failed to secure a new truce in the war triggered by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed again that Israeli forces "will reach every location" in their mission to destroy the group.
"There is no safe haven for terrorists in Gaza," Gallant said on a tour of the Hamas-ruled territory, according to a video released by his office.
In response to the October 7 attack, Israeli forces have carried out a relentless campaign of air strikes and ground operations in Gaza, killing at least 31,272 people, most of them civilians, according to the territory's health ministry.
The Spanish charity vessel Open Arms was on its way to Gaza from Cyprus, towing a barge with 200 tonnes of aid in the first voyage along a planned maritime corridor to Gaza.
Once near Gaza, the aid will be delivered onto a pier built for the operation by US charity World Central Kitchen, which will then distribute it.
However, airdrops and efforts to open a maritime corridor were "no alternative" to land deliveries because they could only provide a fraction of the aid needed, 25 organizations, including Amnesty International and Oxfam, said in a statement Wednesday.
In Gaza City, desperate Palestinians were awaiting the arrival of the Open Arms aid boat, which the charity operating it said could take days.
Standing on the shore, resident Eid Ayub told AFP that "the aid coming by sea and dropped by air is not enough".
"They send aid, but when this aid arrives, there's no entity to distribute it," he said, complaining of "merchants" who seize supplies and then resell them.
Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said on Wednesday a second aid ship "with bigger capacity" was being prepared in Larnaca.
Kombos also hosted a virtual meeting on Wednesday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and senior ministers and officials from Britain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the European Union and the United Nations to discuss the maritime corridor.
"The ministers agreed that there is no meaningful substitute to land routes via Egypt and Jordan and entry points from Israel into Gaza for aid delivery at scale," they said in a joint statement.
They also agreed that opening the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, to humanitarian assistance "would be a welcome and significant complement".
Senior officials will gather in Cyprus on Monday for "in-depth" briefings on the corridor, the statement said.
