First aid ship to land in Gaza after tense deal with Israel

Charity behind Mediterranean migrant rescues to land 200 tonnes of aid on pop-up port

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The first vessel carrying aid by sea to Gaza is set to arrive in the besieged strip on Thursday morning, where it will offload 200 tonnes of desperately needed aid for Palestinian families.

Open Arms, run by a tiny NGO known for rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean sea, told media that it struck a deal with Israeli authorities after tense negotiations.

The small vessel, carrying a floating raft packed with food and medicine donated by the UAE government and a US charity, will land on a small pontoon built by the aid group.

“We have just one mission. We do everything in our hands to do things to comply with our mission,” said Laura Lanuza, projects and communications director for Open Arms, told media on Wednesday night.

Donor nations and aid groups hope it will be the first of many missions.

The mission comes at a time when the UN’s main agency in Gaza, the UNRWA, faces a bitter dispute with the Israeli government over unproven claims of support for Hamas and a defunding crisis.

Israel has blocked land convoys from entering Gaza, leading to a humanitarian crisis. The strip, home to more than two million people, is on the brink of starvation.

The sea corridor could be a lifeline for many of those destitute families.

Where the Open Arms will dock has been kept a secret. The NGO will organise its own landing. A port built by the US Army is in the works but would take two months to build and millions of dollars.

World Central Kitchen, a US charity run by the famous Spanish-American chef Jose Andres, has prepared the cargo of food being towed by the ship on a barge with funding from the UAE.

Talks on technical and political hurdles were arduous as the crisis dragged on, Ms Lanuza said.

Starting in November, plans inched forward as Jordan began air dropping small amounts of aid to specific sites amid warnings that supplies in the enclave were running low.

Experts feared that aid drops could carry a fraction of overland goods, at vastly more cost.

The sea presented a middle ground that could work around the issue of delayed trucked aid, but was cheaper than aid drops and could deliver larger volumes, when temporary port structures had been built.

This is where Open Arms has presented itself as a nimble aid group, not willing to wait for geopolitical shifts, Ms Lanuza said.

“Our team and World Central Kitchen started to work on a technical project that we had to present to Israel,” she said.

“Because even if the corridor was approved by Israel, no one was available to build it, so we had to cover the technical part.