The United Nations on Thursday called for "an immediate humanitarian cease-fire" to break the bottleneck at the Rafah Crossing and enable desperately needed aid to reach Palestinians trapped in Gaza.
The call for a break in the fighting, which erupted on Oct. 7 after Hamas militants launched a bloody surprise attack on Israel, came a day after President Joe Biden got the Israelis to agree to allow limited aid into the teeming Palestinian territory.
"For nearly two weeks, the people of Gaza have gone without any shipments of fuel, food, water, medicine and other essentials," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at a news conference in Egypt. "Disease is spreading. Supplies are dwindling. People are dying."
The Rafah Crossing, along with the El Arish airport in Egypt, "are the lifelines to the people of Gaza," Guterres said.
As Guterres spoke, aid trucks were lined up at the border crossing while Egyptian work crews rushed to repair roads that were badly damaged by Israeli missile attacks launched in retaliation for the brutal Hamas terrorist attack, which has sparked the latest war in the Holy Land.
“Our trucks are loaded and ready to go,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said in a virtual news event. “We’re working with Egypt and Palestine Red Crescent societies to deliver our supplies into Gaza as soon as the border crossing is opened, hopefully tomorrow.”
The announcement from Ghebreyesus came a day after Israel said it would not block the delivery of food, water and medicine into Gaza for its nearly 2.4 million Palestinians.
Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s executive director of emergency programs, said the pre-packed pallets of aid are "extremely well-documented" to ensure only the agreed-upon items get into Gaza. But there are logistical hurdles that need to be overcome.
“The roads are very badly destroyed,” Ryan said. “There’s a huge issue of deconflicting those routes so that the trucks that carry that material are not attacked in any way or disrupted — and that the goods can be offloaded safely and put into storage for further distribution.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it, too, has a convoy with 60 tons of medical supplies and humanitarian aid ready to go into Gaza.
“It’s critically important to deploy," the committee's chief surgeon, Tom Potokar, said in a statement. "There are a huge number of wounded people, and a lot of displaced people and ICRC has a role in helping these people in their suffering. The situation this time is much more difficult. There are far bigger numbers in terms of the people injured. The humanitarian crisis that is unfolding is on a much bigger scale.”
Before the U.N. announcement, an Red Cross spokesperson told reporters there needs to be a cease-fire to ensure that aid can be delivered safely and intact to the trapped Gaza residents.
“We welcome any agreement allowing aid to enter Gaza," the spokesperson said. "However, words must be put into action for them to make a difference for civilians. What is needed is a regular flow of aid into Gaza. Medical staff and other personnel must also be allowed to enter. This is not only about the border opening."
Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side of the border crossing, there was a growing line of people — including a number of American citizens — waiting to get out of Gaza.
Former Chicagoan Emilee Rauschenberger, who now lives in Amman, Jordan, was visiting her Palestinian in-laws in Gaza with her Palestinian husband and their five children when the fighting broke out.
Their escape route blocked, Rauschenberger described in an interview with NBC News' Lester Holt a hell-scape of bread lines and ruins and growing desperation accompanied by the "humming of drones, constantly in the nights."
"Whenever it gets dark, you stay inside completely and you hear bombings near and far,” Rauschenberger said.
A 29-year-old man who lives near Houston and asked not to be named told NBC News that he has been in touch with his family, who live in northern Gaza near the Israeli border. He said many of them are U.S. citizens and they have tried and failed repeatedly to escape across the border.
"They’ve gone to the border multiple times and have been unable to leave," he said. "They went back to the north because you can only camp outside of Rafah for so long. You realize maybe it’s safer to be in your home."
But the situation remains dangerous. He said their home was struck by a missile on Wednesday. And then, when they fled their home, there was a second missile strike that claimed the life of his 14-year-old cousin Jude, maimed his uncle and nearly killed his cousin Yousef.
"Yousef went downstairs to get out of the house," he said. "And right in front of them another missile hit and Yousef’s sister lost her life, his Dad lost his hand. "
None of his relatives belong to Hamas or any other militant group, he said.
