The announcement comes as national security spokesman Jake Sullivan visits the region amid growing international isolation.
Israeli authorities have announced the temporary reopening of the Karem Abu Salem border crossing with Gaza, called Kerem Shalom by Israel, responding to US calls to allow more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as fighting continues.
In a statement on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the country’s Cabinet had approved the “temporary” measure, which US officials welcomed as a positive step.
“The cabinet decision stipulates that only humanitarian aid coming from Egypt will be transferred to the Gaza Strip in this way,” the statement said.
For the past two months, the Rafah border crossing with Egypt has been the only entry point into the strip, where a trickle of aid has done little to address the humanitarian crisis caused by an Israeli attack that has killed more than 18,000 people and left 80 has displaced. percent of all residents.
As Israel’s campaign in Gaza continues, the United Nations and other world organizations have warned of serious shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
UN agencies say that as the bombardment continues, it has become impossible to distribute aid outside Rafah, where the population has grown to around one million, while hundreds of thousands of people are displaced from areas further north.
The decision comes a day after White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials to discuss the timing and style of Israeli military operations in Gaza, as Israel and its US ally come under increasing international pressure. to end the fighting.
“It’s an important concession, the Israelis would say, because Israel said right at the start of this war that there will be no further contact and no further ties between Gaza and Israel, while now they have to open the Kerem Shalom crossing. for goods under American pressure so that Israel can fulfill its agreement [letting in] 200 trucks of aid per day,” Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith reported from Tel Aviv.
“And as an indication: before the start of the war, 500 trucks entered Gaza every day, while much less emergency aid was needed.”
“President [Joe] Biden raised this issue during recent phone calls with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it was a major topic of discussion during my visit to Israel over the past two days,” Sullivan said in a statement Friday, calling the opening an “important step.”
Sullivan also met Friday with President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, to discuss the future of the PA and increasing violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Abbas told Sullivan that the US “must intervene to force Israel to stop its aggression against our people in the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem.”
The US has suggested that the PA could take control of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Hamas, but Abbas and the PA are deeply unpopular among the Palestinian population due to the policy of security coordination with Israel.
Many Palestinians see the policy as a form of complicity in the Israeli occupation.
Al Jazeera correspondent Charles Stratford also noted from the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank that many Palestinians have little confidence in the words of American officials.
“You talk to any Palestinian here and there is absolutely no trust in any rhetoric, any statement that comes out of the US government, whether it’s Jake Sullivan or Joe Biden. There is deep, deep distrust,” Stratford said.
