Arab Support
Egypt has sent 261 convoys and a million tonnes into Gaza
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The Egyptian aid operation into Gaza is now counted in convoy numbers, and the count has reached 261.
The 261st convoy of the Egyptian Red Crescent's campaign, Zad al-Izza — From Egypt to Gaza, entered the Strip on 23 August through the auxiliary gate of the Rafah land crossing and on towards Kerem Shalom, the Malta News Agency reported.
Its trucks carried flour, fresh bread, legumes, canned food, medicines, personal hygiene products, tents, clothing and fuel. The campaign is run with the participation of some 75,000 Egyptian Red Crescent volunteers.
What has actually been delivered#
The cumulative figure is the one worth recording. Since the start of the war, around 58,000 trucks have carried more than one million tonnes of humanitarian and relief supplies into Gaza through the Egyptian route, along with ambulances and fuel tankers.
Two convoys earlier this month show what a single delivery looks like. The 257th, dispatched on 16 August, carried more than 3,679 tonnes: over 1,322 tonnes of food baskets and flour, around 428 tonnes of relief goods, medical equipment and medicines, and more than 1,929 tonnes of fuel and petroleum products. The 253rd entered through the same auxiliary gate at Rafah on 10 August.
The Emirati contribution ran alongside it on the same day in August, with five convoys totalling 75 trucks and 800 tonnes of food, medical supplies and shelter materials crossing into the Strip, as reported in the Emirati press.
261 convoys, roughly 58,000 trucks, more than one million tonnes.
The Egyptian Red Crescent's running total for the Zad al-Izza campaign
Delivered, and not yet delivered#
This is completed work, and it should be recorded as such: fuel that ran generators, flour that became bread, tents that housed families through a second displacement. It is also the most consistent Arab contribution of the war, sustained across nearly two years without interruption.
It is a different thing from reconstruction financing, and the two should not be added together. Around $7 billion has been committed by a dozen states for Gaza's rebuilding, the Gulf business press reported in February — $1.2 billion from the United Arab Emirates, and a billion each from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
This paper reported on 13 August that much of that money has not yet reached the World Bank-administered fund that is meant to hold it.
Relief keeps people alive; reconstruction money rebuilds what they live in. Egypt's convoys are the first, delivered and countable. The second is still mostly a pledge.
There is one more constraint the tonnage cannot solve. The Egyptian convoys still route through Kerem Shalom in the south, because the northern crossing at Erez remains closed to goods — an Israeli decision that was prepared, announced to the United Nations for 1 September, and then unmade this week inside the prime minister's office.
