The Open Arms vessel which ferried food rations provided by aid group World Central Kitchen to the Gaza Strip docked in the port of Larnaca on the southern coast of Cyprus on April 3.ETIENNE TORBEY/Getty Images
The United Nations has suspended movements at night in Gaza for at least 48 hours to evaluate security issues following the killing of staff working for the World Central Kitchen (WCK) food charity, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Wednesday.
He said the suspension started on Tuesday. The World Food Program is continuing operations during the day, including daily efforts to send convoys to the north of Gaza “where people are dying,” Dujarric said.
“As famine closes in we need humanitarian staff and supplies to be able to move freely and safely across the Gaza Strip,” he told reporters.
The strike on the convoy of people working for aid group World Central Kitchen killed citizens of Australia, Britain and Poland as well as Palestinians and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada.
Meanwhile, a sea convoy of undelivered food for Gaza returned to Cyprus on Wednesday after aid workers of World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed in an Israeli air strike on Monday evening.
A cargo ship carrying 240 metric tons of food that had been destined for the people of the besieged Palestinian enclave sailed back to Larnaca in Cyprus following the deadly attack, dropping anchor just outside the port.
A second ship, the Open Arms owned by a Spanish NGO working with WCK, arrived earlier.
The undelivered aid was part of a consignment of about 340 tons sent to Gaza from Cyprus on March 30. The aid workers killed in Gaza had just finished unloading 100 tons from a barge, also sent from Cyprus.
WCK, active in Gaza since October, has paused operations in the territory since the killings, and turned around its flotilla of ships back to Cyprus.
In March WCK launched an inaugural sea corridor transporting aid to the enclave from the east Mediterranean island.
Cyprus has offered to supplement aid getting in to Gaza by sea with a fast track on-island security screening process for aid overseen by Israel.
Spanish charity Open Arms, which provided a salvage vessel for both missions arranged by WCK, took a group photo of activists wearing WCK t-shirts and embracing each other on the bow of the salvage ship during its sail to Cyprus.
They wrote on X: “The end of mission 110 arrives, the one we never could have imagined, the most painful.
“We miss Saifeddin, Zomi, Damian, Jacob, John, Jim, and James, but they will remain forever in our memory, and we will continue to speak up for them, for the more than 32,500 people killed in #Gaza, the hundreds of humanitarian workers, the destroyed hospitals, journalists and all the ‘isolated cases’ that are not an accident, but part of an structure of death and destruction. We will never forget you.
“Today, the pain of the @wckitchen family is also ours.”