Published: 31 October 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Government reopens second of three water pipelines that provide water to the Gaza Strip, after phone call from Biden on the weekend. ICC prosecutor visits Rafah crossing.
Israel reopened the second of three water pipelines that provide water to the Gaza Strip, allowing for a total of 28.5 million litres a day to flow into to Gaza. This is just over half the approximately 49 million litres a day Israel supplied before Hamas’s October 7 massacres triggered war with the Jewish state.
Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) which is part of the IDF, stated that there was now enough water being supplied to Gaza for basic humanitarian needs and insisted that there was no shortage of either food or water for the territory’s residents. Additional humanitarian aid is expected to enter the territory in the coming weeks.
This came as the US President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Sunday that the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza needs to “immediately and significantly increase,” the White House said.
Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Washington was asking hard questions of Israel, including on issues surrounding humanitarian aid, distinguishing between terrorists and innocent civilians and on how Israel is thinking through its military operation.
Biden made those calls as the IDF expanded its ground war and Hamas claimed that the death toll among the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has passed the 8,000 mark. However, these figures cannot be independently verified and are believed to count both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza.
Noting that Hamas militants have embedded themselves among the Palestinian population and in civilian infrastructure, Sullivan said. "What we believe is that every hour, every day of this military operation, the IDF, the Israeli government should be taking every possible means available to them to distinguish between Hamas terrorists who are legitimate military targets and civilians who are not," he said on CNN.
