| Advertisement |
March 12 (UPI) -- A charity ship towing a barge loaded with 200 tons of aid bound for Gaza departed from a port on the south coast of Cyprus on Tuesday, after a four-day delay. The Open Arms, a 120-foot Spanish-registered salvage/rescue vessel "loaded with food for Palestinian families on the brink of famine," set sail via a new Cyprus-Gaza sea corridor set up to ship aid into the war-torn enclave, World Central Kitchen, the U.S. charity behind the mission said in a post on X.
Advertisement
"We have served 35 million meals in Gaza and the maritime corridor will allow us to provide millions more," said WCK community outreach manager Juan Camilo.
The organization's founder, Chef Jose Andres wrote on social media that construction of a jetty on the Gaza coast that WCK will use to offload the aid was "well underway" with the help of its partners on the ground in the strip.
He said the goal of the mission, for which the United Arab Emirates has provided the bulk of the funding, was "to establish a highway of boats and barges stocked with millions of meals continuously headed towards Gaza."
"We may fail, but the biggest failure will be not trying. Thank you to all that made it possible....we could bring millions of meals a day. The people of the north will be fed!" Andres said.
"Let this moment at the beginning of Ramadan be a good omen, for peace in the Middle East."
WCK, which has set up a joint operation in the port city of Larnaca with Spanish refugee charity Open Arms to stockpile, pack and palletize rice, flour, legumes, canned vegetables, and canned fish and meat, said in a news release that it had a further 500 tons of supplies ready to go.
The vessel had been scheduled to set sail Friday night on a pilot mission, timed to coincide with the announcement by the European Union, Britain, the United Arab Emirates and United States of a new Cyprus-Gaza maritime corridor to ship aid to a temporary port the United States is constructing on the coast of Gaza.
The sailing was postponed first to Monday and then Tuesday, due to 'technical difficulties' surrounding the offloading of the aid once it arrived off the coast of Gaza due to the fact construction work on the port the United States is building has yet to begin.
A U.S. Army logistics support vessel is en route from the United States with rapid deployment forces, equipment and materiel to build a temporary pier onto which aid ships can offload humanitarian supplies but is not expected to arrive in the region for another two weeks.
The General Frank S. Besson set sail from Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia on Saturday, less than 36 hours after U.S. President Joe Biden's pledge to build the facility to get aid into Gaza by sea in his State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday.
