Israel pauses daytime offensive in part of Gaza
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Monday that it had paused operations during daylight hours in parts of the southern Gaza Strip, as a new policy announced a day earlier appeared to take hold, along with cautious hopes that it would allow more food and other goods to reach desperate civilians.
Aid workers said they hoped that the daily pause in the Israeli offensive would make it less dangerous to deliver vital supplies to areas in central and southern Gaza from Kerem Shalom, a key border crossing between Israel and Gaza, removing one of many obstacles to their beleaguered operations.
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But aid agencies warned that other restrictions on movement, as well as lawlessness in the territory, would still make it difficult to meet the dire needs of people in Gaza struggling to survive after eight months of war.
With stockpiles in southern Gaza dwindling, “maybe for a couple of weeks they’ll have enough food, but if we cannot have access and sustain that, then that’s going to be a big problem,” said Carl Skau, the deputy director of the World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations that distributes food in Gaza.
The shift in Israeli operations came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disbanded the war Cabinet he had formed after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, an Israeli official said Monday, highlighting the strains within his government over the future of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
The official characterized Netanyahu’s decision as a largely symbolic move after two of the five members of the war Cabinet, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, quit last week amid disagreements over the direction of the war. The men, both former military chiefs, are prominent members of the centrist opposition in parliament to the right-wing government.
Their departure left Netanyahu more isolated, hearing from a narrower range of voices, without the air of interparty unity the war Cabinet had at least suggested. “What he has now is more of an echo chamber,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and analyst who worked as an aide to Netanyahu in the 1990s.
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