US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance has been delivered so far across a temporary floating pier to Gaza, but not all the aid has reached warehouses.
Aid deliveries began arriving at the US-built pier on Friday as Israel comes under growing global pressure to allow more supplies into the besieged coastal enclave.
The UN said that ten truckloads of food aid – transported from the pier site by UN contractors – were received on Friday at a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir El Balah in Gaza.
But on Saturday, only five truckloads made it to the warehouse after 11 others were cleaned out by people during the journey through an area that a UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said has been hard to access with humanitarian aid.
The UN did not receive any aid from the pier on Sunday or Monday.
Israel says retrieved bodies of hostages were in Gaza tunnels
The Israeli army has said that the bodies of four hostages retrieved from Gaza last week were found in tunnels under Jabalia, where troops have been engaged in fierce fighting in recent days.
The army said last week it had recovered the bodies of Ron Benjamin, Yitzhak Gelerenter, Shani Louk, and Amit Buskila, all of whom it said had been killed in Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel.
Their remains were recovered “from underground tunnels in Jabalia in northern Gaza”, the army said late last night in a statement.
During a military operation, Israeli soldiers searched a suspected building in which a tunnel shaft was located, the army said.
“Soldiers then entered the underground tunnel route in a night operation and inside it conducted combat,” it said.
During the fighting the soldiers “located the bodies of the hostages and rescued them from the tunnels,” the army said.
Gelerenter, Louk, and Buskila were killed and abducted from the Nova music festival, while Benjamin was killed at the Mefalsim intersection from where his body was taken to Gaza, the army said last week.
Thousands of young people had gathered on 6 and 7 October to dance to electronic music at the Nova festival event held near Re’im kibbutz, close to the Gaza border.
Fighters from Hamas crossed over from Gaza and killed more than 360 people at the festival, Israeli officials have said.
The Nova festival victims accounted for nearly a third of the more than 1,170 people killed in the 7 October attack, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Out of the 252 people taken hostage that day, 124 are still being held inside Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,562 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Since early May the Israeli military has been engaged in renewed street battles in northern and central Gaza.
On Friday, the army told AFP that the fighting in the northern town of Jalalia was “perhaps the fiercest” in over seven months of war.
Fighting in north and central Gaza erupted again when the military began its assault in the far-southern city of Rafah on 7 May.
Read more: Israel, Hamas reject ICC bid to arrest leaders for war crimes
Separately, Israeli forces raided Jenin in the occupied West Bank in anoperation that the Palestinian health ministry said killed three Palestinians and left eight others wounded.
The army said it was an operation against militants and several Palestinian gunmen were shot.
