Our View: Lack of information about the Amalthea aid corridor

Although Cyprus has received plaudits from the EU and the United States for the Amalthea humanitarian sea corridor, it appears that it has little control over the operation. The Republic may be offering the port from which aid will be shipped, but it seems that the decision about when a ship will set sail and its destination are taken outside Cyprus, without the government here being informed.

Last Friday, for example the Federation of Employers and Industrialists (OEV) had urged its members to send basic food items and medicines to Larnaca port for Palestinians in Gaza, by Monday (April 29), and it had been told that the aid ship was expected to set sail on Tuesday (April 30). OEV also published a set of instructions regarding the dimension and weight of pallets that could be loaded and unloaded by cranes.

Meanwhile a foreign ministry spokesman contacted by the Cyprus Mail last Friday could not say when a ship with aid would go to Gaza, pointing out that food would be stored. It was a case of aid being gathered, he said, suggesting that it would be sent to Gaza when the jetty being set up by the United States was completed. The jetty is expected to be completed in less than two weeks.

On Friday night, however, official sources announced that the aid ship Jennifer had set sail from Larnaca and on the next day President Nikos Christodoulides announced that the Amalthea initiative had resumed operations “in collaboration with the countries with which we started this operation: UAE, USA and EU”.

The 400 tonnes of aid, sent by the UAE through Larnaca, arrived in the Israeli port of Ashdod on Sunday, according to an announcement by the foreign ministry of the UAE. How long it will take for trucks to take the desperately needed aid into Gaza from Israel, the announcement did not say.

This was the third time the Amalthea corridor was used, since its opening some six weeks ago, and the second time the Jennifer has made the trip to Israel. Operations were stopped after the Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy, that had unloaded 100 tonnes of food aid delivered by sea, in a Gaza warehouse, killing seven aid workers on April 2.

But even without this setback, it is unlikely deliveries of aid via the sea corridor would have been frequent. With the aid now arriving in Ashdod, it is anyone’s guess how long it will take for the food to reach Gaza. Perhaps, deliveries via sea will be speeded up once the jetty is completed, even though the consensus is that the most effective way of getting aid into Gaza is by land.

Perhaps the building of a jetty off Gaza will allow more aid to arrive by sea from Larnaca and hopefully the Cyprus government will also be informed of these plans.