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Israeli military says it will begin a daily “tactical pause” to allow for humanitarian aid into southern Gaza
The Israeli military announced on Sunday a “tactical pause” throughout daytime hours in parts of southern Gaza to free up a backlog of humanitarian aid deliveries destined for desperate Palestinians enduring a humanitarian crisis sparked by the war with Hamas.
The daily pause announced by the military applies to about 7.4 miles of road in the Rafah area. However, fighting in the city of Rafah, where Israel is targeting the remaining brigades of Hamas militants, would continue, the military said.
The army said the pause would begin at 8 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) and remain in effect until 7 p.m. local time (1600 GMT). It said the pauses would take place every day until further notice.
Abdel Kareem Hana / AP
The pause is aimed at allowing aid trucks to reach the nearby Israel-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, the main entry point for incoming aid, and travel safely to the Salah a-Din highway, a main north-south road, the military said. The crossing has suffered from a bottleneck since Israeli ground troops moved into Rafah in early May.
The pause falls short of a complete cease-fire in the beleaguered territory that has been sought by the international community, including Israel’s top ally, the United States.
If it holds, the limited halt in fighting could help address some of the overwhelming needs of Palestinians that have surged even more in recent weeks as the war, now in its ninth month, continues.
COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees aid distribution in Gaza, said the route would increase the flow of aid to other parts of Gaza, including Khan Younis, Muwasi and central Gaza. Hard-hit northern Gaza, which was an early target in the war, is being served by goods entering from a crossing in the north.
The military said the pause Sunday, which begins as Muslims in Gaza and elsewhere start marking the major Eid Al-Adha holiday, came after discussions with the United Nations and international aid agencies.
Following criticism over the move from ultranationalists in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, who oppose a halt in the war, the military said fighting is not being paused in the rest of southern Gaza and neither is there any change regarding the entry of aid in general.
Jehad Alshrafi / AP
The pause along the southern route comes as Israel and Hamas are weighing the latest proposal for a cease-fire, a plan that was detailed by President Biden in the administration’s most concentrated diplomatic push for a halt to the fighting and the release of hostages taken by the militant group. While Biden described the proposal as an Israeli one, Israel has not fully embraced it and Hamas has demanded changes that appear unacceptable to Israel.
The fighting continues unabated, and Israel announced the names Sunday of a total of 11 soldiers killed in recent attacks in Gaza, including one who died from wounds sustained in an assault last week. That puts the number of soldiers killed since Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza last year at 308. Hamas killed 1,200 people during its Oct. 7 attack that started the war and took 250 hostage, Israeli authorities say. Health officials in Hamas-run Gaza say more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.
Israel’s eight-month military offensive against Hamas, sparked by the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack, has plunged Gaza into a humanitarian crisis, with the U.N. reporting widespread hunger and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine.
The flow of aid in southern Gaza declined just as the humanitarian need grew. More than 1 million Palestinians, many of whom had already been displaced, fled Rafah after the invasion, crowding into other parts of southern and central Gaza. Most now languish in ramshackle tent camps, using trenches as latrines, with open sewage in the streets.
COGAT says there are no restrictions on the entry of trucks. It says more than 8,600 trucks of all kinds, both aid and commercial, entered Gaza from all crossings from May 2 to June 13, an average of 201 a day. But much of that aid has piled up at the crossings and not reached its final destination.
A spokesman for COGAT, Shimon Freedman, said it was the U.N.’s fault that its cargos stacked up on the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom. He said the agencies have “fundamental logistical problems that they have not fixed,” especially a lack of trucks.
The U.N. denies such allegations. It says the fighting between Israel and Hamas often makes it too dangerous for U.N. trucks inside Gaza to travel to Kerem Shalom, which is right next to Israel’s border.
It also says the pace of deliveries has been slowed because the Israeli military must authorize drivers to travel to the site, a system Israel says was designed for the drivers’ safety. Due to a lack of security, aid trucks in some cases have also been looted by crowds as they moved along Gaza’s roads.
The new arrangement aims to reduce the need for coordinating deliveries by providing an 11-hour uninterrupted window each day for trucks to move in and out of the crossing.
It was not immediately clear whether the army would provide security to protect the aid trucks as they moved along the highway.
Meanwhile, a temporary offshore pier designed to bring desperately needed humanitarian aid is being temporarily dismantled – for a second time – because of rough seas.
U.S. Central Command announced Friday that the U.S.-built pier was being removed from Gaza’s coast and towed back to Ashdod, Israel, to prevent it from being damaged. The pier will be “rapidly re-anchored” once water conditions are calm, CENTCOM said, but did not provide an estimate on when that would be.
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A pasteurization approach widely used in the dairy industry proved to be effective at killing bird flu in milk after all, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday, after an earlier federal lab study raised questions about the approach.
The FDA says its new results are the latest to show that drinking pasteurized grocery store milk remains safe, despite an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI H5N1, on dairy farms across at least eight states.
“We had a lot of anecdotal evidence. But we wanted to have direct evidence about HPAI and bovine milk. So we began to build this custom instrument that replicates, on a pilot scale, commercial processing,” Prater said.
It comes weeks after researchers at the National Institutes of Health found some infectious bird flu virus was able to survive pasteurization in lab tests.
Both the FDA and the earlier NIH researchers looked at an approach called “flash pasteurization” or high temperature short time processing, which heats milk for at least 15 seconds at 161°F.
Unlike the NIH study, Prater said the study with the U.S. Department of Agriculture took longer to complete because it was designed to more accurately simulate all the steps that go into processing milk in the commercial dairy industry.
The FDA said the tests show the pasteurization process was killing the virus even before it reached the final stages when milk is held at the right temperature, offering a “large margin of safety.”
“What we found in this study actually is that the virus is completely inactivated even before it gets into the holding tube,” Prater said.
Virus in raw milk
Virus is likely being spread from infected cows to other animals and to humans that have worked on dairy farms through droplets of raw milk teeming with the virus, the USDA has said.
Eric Deeble, acting senior adviser for USDA’s H5N1 response, told reporters on Tuesday that none of the confirmed infected herds so far had been supplying raw milk.
Hundreds of pasteurized milk and other dairy product samples tested by the FDA so far from grocery stores have also so far not found any infectious virus, but fragments of dead virus have turned up — suggesting missed infections.
Prater said a second round of testing is underway, which will also look at cheese made from raw milk.