Palestinians and aid agencies in Gaza on Wednesday said they were still waiting for aid to enter the Strip more than 48 hours after Israel, amid mounting international pressure, said it would start sending in desperately needed food and supplies after an 11-week blockade.

The UN has said even though trucks have entered Gaza, the Israeli army has not given permission to pick up the aid on the Gaza side of the border.  The IDF body responsible has declined to comment on the charges.

“None of this aid – that is a very limited number of trucks – has reached the Gaza population,” said Antoine Renard, country director of the World Food Program (WFP), who said the trucks appeared to be stopped in Kerem Shalom, the sprawling logistics hub at the south-eastern corner of the Gaza Strip.

Abdel-Nasser Al-Ajramy, the head of the Gaza bakery owners’ society, said at least 25 bakeries that were told they would receive flour from the WFP had seen nothing, and the people waiting for food had no relief from hunger.

“There is no flour, no food, no water,” said Sabah Warsh Agha, a 67-year-old woman from the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya sheltering in a cluster of tents near the beach in Gaza City. “We used to get water from the pump, now the pump has stopped working. There is no diesel or gas.”

Umm Talal Al-Masri, 53, a displaced Palestinian living in an area of Gaza City, on Wednesday described the situation as “unbearable.”

“No one is distributing anything to us. Everyone is waiting for aid, but we haven’t received anything,” she told AFP.

“We’re grinding lentils and pasta to make some loaves of bread, and we barely manage to prepare one meal a day.”

The Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which coordinates the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza, on Wednesday declined to respond to claims by the United Nations that its agencies have been unable to collect and distribute aid brought into the territory on Tuesday through the Kerem Shalom goods crossing.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman to the UN Secretary General, said on Tuesday that members of a UN team “waited several hours for Israeli green light to access Kerem Shalom area” to pick up the aid that was brought in, but ultimately they had not been able to do so.

COGAT said Tuesday night that 93 UN trucks carrying “flour for bakeries, food for babies, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical drugs” were “transferred via the Kerem Shalom Crossing into the Gaza Strip.”

Israel had blocked all aid........

© The Times of Israel