Scholz will travel to the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba on Saturday to meet on Sunday with Jordan’s King Abdullah before flying on to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“It is necessary for aid to reach Gaza on a larger scale now. That will be a topic that I also have to talk about,” Scholz told journalists ahead of his trip.
He also voiced concern about Israel’s planned offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than half the Palestinian’s enclave’s population of 2.3 million have taken shelter.
“There is a danger that a comprehensive offensive in Rafah will result in many terrible civilian casualties, which must be strictly prohibited,” he added.
Germany’s air force said it dropped pallets with four tons of relief goods by air into the enclave on Saturday.
“Every package counts. But airdrops are just a drop in the ocean,” the foreign ministry said on the social media platform X.
Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, has displaced most of the population and left people in dire need of food and other essentials.
A second cargo of food aid was ready to depart by sea from Cyprus to Gaza on Saturday, the island’s president said, after a first aid shipment landed in the besieged Palestinian enclave overnight.
Almost 200 tons of food arrived in the enclave late on Friday, the first shipment in a new aid route to the Gaza Strip, devastated by five months of war.
“The first ship has started its return to Cyprus, and we are ready to dispatch the second ship,” Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides told journalists.
The second ship, with 240 tons of aid, was moored at Larnaca port awaiting a signal to sail.
Update from Cyprus WCK’s Trish is at the port in Larnaca where final preparations are underway for our next shipment of aid to sail to Gaza. The crew is boarding the support vessel that will accompany the aid and oversee the technical offloading process.#ChefsForThePeople pic.twitter.com/ODXTQ3LgR0
US-based charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), which arranged the mission with the UAE and Spanish charity Open Arms with support from the Cypriot government, said the new shipment included pallets of canned goods and bulk products.
WCK said the second boat also had two forklifts and a crane to assist with future maritime deliveries to Gaza. A crew ship would accompany the cargo boat with eight workers to operate the machinery and offload the aid, it said. In the first mission, the charity offloaded aid onto a makeshift jetty WCK built from the rubble of destroyed buildings.
“Hopefully, this corridor we open today will be a pathway alongside the terrestrial ones to alleviate hunger, relieve suffering, and restore humanity to the civilian population,” Open Arms, which provided the ship, said on Friday on X.
The main UN agency operating in Gaza said on Saturday that one in three children under age 2 in northern Gaza is now acutely malnourished and famine is looming.
Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, has displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million population and left people in dire need of food and other essentials. (Reporting by Stamos Prousalis, Yiannis Kourtoglou and Michele Kambas Editing by Frances Kerry)
