Charity hopes to send second food aid ship to Gaza in next few days

The charity sending food aid to Gaza on a ship travelling across the Mediterranean from Cyprus is loading a second boat with supplies, which it hopes will set off in the coming days.

Pallets containing 300 tonnes of food aid – 50% more than the first shipment – are expected to be screened and loaded by the end of Thursday, but there is no indication yet when it will leave the port of Larnaca.

The supplies include cans of beans, carrots, tuna, chickpeas and corn, plus parboiled rice, flour, oil and salt.

The first ship, which is towing a barge loaded with 200 tonnes of aid, enough for half a million meals, is expected to arrive on the Gaza coast in the coming days after leaving Larnarca on Tuesday.

World Central Kitchen (WCK), a US-based food aid charity working with the governments of Cyprus and the UAE, and the Spanish NGO Open Arms, is not releasing details of the ship’s whereabouts for security reasons.

Theodoros Gotsis, spokesperson for Cyprus’s foreign ministry, said the Spanish-flagged aid ship was making “good progress” and on course for the Gaza coast. It was taking longer than expected to arrive because the boat was by necessity moving very slowly.

Tracking apps had “been jammed” because the ship was sailing in seas off a war zone where communication was patchy, he said.

WCK said it had an additional 500 tonnes of aid in Cyprus ready to be loaded in what it hoped would be a series of journeys across the Mediterranean, which have been given the name Operation Safeena, meaning boat or vessel in Arabic.

It was still uncertain on Thursday how the aid would be unloaded and distributed once it reaches the Gaza coastline. WCK volunteers and others in Gaza are building a jetty from the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli bombing during the past five months.

Meanwhile, Gaza health ministry officials said six people were killed and dozens wounded when the Israeli military opened fire as crowds waited for aid trucks in Gaza City on Wednesday evening.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.

There have been chaotic scenes and deadly incidents at aid distributions as desperately hungry people scramble for food. More than 100 people were killed last month as they waited for an aid delivery near Gaza City.

Palestinian health authorities said Israeli forces shot dead the victims, while Israel said they had been trampled or run over.

Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s humanitarian aid and crisis management chief, said on Thursday there were already pockets of famine in Gaza, and it could spread to the whole region. He urged Israel to open more road routes to deliver aid.

The UN has warned that at least 576,000 people in Gaza – a quarter of the population – are on the brink of famine and global pressure has been growing on Israel to allow more access to the enclave.

The WCK says it has dispatched more than 1,400 aids trucks across the Rafah crossing, served more than 35m meals, and opened more than 60 community kitchens across Gaza since the war began.