Roving Periscope: As British PM Sunak visits, Israel pauses, allows aid, and gives a long rope to Hamas
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After pounding the Gaza Strip for nearly two weeks and amassing troops and weapons in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, Israel might be giving a long rope to the Hamas terror group to make its next move, as Tel Aviv allowed limited aid from the Egyptian border to flow into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
On Thursday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had already supported Israel, arrived in Tel Aviv to meet with President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before traveling to other capitals in the Middle East, in what is viewed as an attempt to revive President Joe Biden’s botched ‘peace mission.’
PM Netanyahu, sharing the stage with Sunak, said Israel is fighting “the world’s battle against the Nazis.”
The alleged killing of some 500 people in a Gaza hospital blast on Tuesday, apparently to sabotage President Biden’s mission, had enraged Muslims worldwide, prompting a pause in the Israeli strategy.
Its relentless bombing of the Palestinians’ enclave, which reduced large parts of the Gaza Strip’s cities and towns to rubble, had united the Muslim world against Israel. President Biden, who air-dashed to Tel Aviv on Wednesday to douse fires, had to cut a sorry figure when Jordan called off a meeting with him and Egyptian and Palestinian leadership in the backdrop of the growing Muslim anger worldwide.
President Biden, who announced USD 100 million worth of humanitarian aid to the one million displaced Palestinians, might have cautioned Israel against going overboard, although the US had deployed six aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and over 2,000 American commandoes to protect the Jewish state.
His counsel to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war cabinet may have persuaded Israel to pause. This strategy—to let the limited aid flow into Gaza, see the next move by Hamas, and then respond—is now unfolding.
According to the media reports on Thursday, Israel will allow limited aid to flow into Gaza, through the Egyptian borders.
President Biden said his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi would let in an initial group of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. White House officials said the air will start moving on Friday, October 20.
More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid are waiting at or near the Rafah Crossing on the Gaza-Egyptian border.
“If Hamas confiscates aid, it will end,” said President Biden. “The bottom line is that President al-Sisi deserves real credit because he was very accommodating,” he added.
After the October 7 Hamas invasion, Israel announced a siege of the Gaza Strip shutting off water, power, food, and fuel supply to the enclave of 2.3 million people. Following this, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled Northern Gaza as Israel bombarded it.
The announcement of allowing humanitarian aid came after the Gaza hospital incident for which Israel blamed the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) claiming that its misfired rocket landed on the health facility.
Meanwhile, Egypt announced the creation of a “sustainable” humanitarian aid corridor into Gaza as hundreds of trucks, carrying essential supplies, are waiting to enter the besieged Palestinian enclave.
President al-Sisi said on Wednesday that he would not allow a large number of refugees from the Gaza Strip to enter Egypt, because it could set a precedent for Palestinians in the West Bank also to move into neighboring Jordan. In other words, if the fleeing Gazans were allowed to enter Egypt and Jordan, Israel could potentially reoccupy both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The Gaza Strip, blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007, has seen relentless Israeli airstrikes since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble with survivors struggling for food and water.
“The situation in Gaza is spiraling out of control,” World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X. “We need violence on all sides to stop.”
The situation in Gaza and the deadly hospital bombing sparked widespread protests across the Arab and Muslim world. The Iran-backed and Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah has called for mass mobilization, with “death to America, death to Israel” chants ringing across the Middle East and beyond.
