nternational Desk News :: Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has agreed to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza to allow a first batch of around 20 humanitarian aid trucks through, United States president Joe Biden said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u2018He agreed to… let up to 20 trucks through to begin with,\u2019 Biden told reporters after calling Sisi from Air Force One while returning from a visit to Israel, where he was showing solidarity over the October 7 Hamas attacks.<\/p>\n
The shipment would likely not cross until Friday, as the road at the crossing needed repairs, Biden said.<\/p>\n
\u2018They\u2019re going to patch the road. They have to fill in potholes to get these trucks through. And that\u2019s going to occur — they expect it\u2019ll take about eight hours tomorrow,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
The first 20 trucks will be a test of a system for distributing aid without allowing the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, which controls Gaza, to benefit, the US president said.<\/p>\n
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\nThe United Nations is set to distribute aid on the Gaza side of the border.<\/p>\n
\u2018If Hamas confiscates it or doesn\u2019t let it get through or just confiscates it, then it\u2019s going to end, because we\u2019re not going to be sending any humanitarian aid to Hamas if they\u2019re going to be confiscating it. That\u2019s the commitment that I\u2019ve made,\u2019 Biden said.<\/p>\n
He added that the 20 trucks represented a \u2018first tranche,\u2019 but \u2018150 or something\u2019 trucks are waiting in total. Whether the rest are allowed to cross will depend on \u2018how it goes.\u2019<\/p>\n
Biden had been due to meet Sisi on Wednesday at a four-way summit in Jordan, but it was canceled after a deadly strike on a Gaza hospital that caused anger across the Arab world.<\/p>\n
He said he had instead talked to Sisi from Air Force One for about half an hour.<\/p>\n
\u2018The bottom line is that he (Sisi) deserves some real credit because he was very accommodating,\u2019 the US president added.<\/p>\n
Biden characterized his trip to the war zone as a success and said that while expressing US support for ally Israel, he was \u2018very blunt with the Israelis\u2019 on the need to allow aid into Gaza.<\/p>\n
\u2018If you have an opportunity to alleviate the pain, you should do it. Period. And if you don\u2019t, you\u2019re going to lose credibility worldwide. And I think everyone understands that,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
Asked by journalists about reports that his administration had told Israel that US forces would fight alongside Israeli troops in response to any attack by the powerful Lebanese movement Hezbollah against Israel, Biden said this was \u2018not true.\u2019<\/p>\n
However, he said that \u2018our military is talking with their military about what the alternatives are\u2019 in the event of a Hezbollah attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
nternational Desk News :: Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has agreed to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza to allow a first batch of around 20 humanitarian aid trucks through, United States president Joe Biden said on Wednesday. \u2018He agreed to… let up to 20 trucks through to begin with,\u2019 Biden told reporters after calling Sisi from Air Force One while returning from a visit to Israel, where he was showing solidarity over the October 7 Hamas attacks. The shipment would likely not cross until Friday, as the road at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3523,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521\/revisions\/3523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}