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Essential but long overdue.
That was the assessment today by Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lamy of Israel's decision to temporarily pause the fighting in three parts of Gaza to allow humanitarian corridors to be established there.
Today's decision,
which has led to some aid trucks entering the territory and a number of aid drops being carried out over it,
followed a ratcheting up of the rhetorical pressure on Israel in recent days.
More than 100 aid agencies and more than two dozen governments have signed strongly worded statements calling on Israel to scrap its current method of getting aid to civilians as a spectre of malnutrition has roamed the Gaza Strip,
yielding front-page images on the world's newspapers of emaciated children.
For its part,
Israel says it's taken the decision to refute the false claim of deliberate starvation in the Gaza Strip.
Antoine Renard is the chief of operations at Gaza for the UN's World Food Programme.
What will remain a challenge for us is that the volume that we need to bring,
given the fact that it's been such a long closure,
is actually the massive amount of people that are so desperate that they're rushing on convoy.
So if we manage just the last week to bring around 4,200 metric tons of food within Gaza,
it's again not enough because we're supposed to actually reach 62,000 metric tons every month.
So what will be still a challenge for us is actually to manage to go beyond the wave of people that are rushing on any convoy coming
because they're so desperate and to restart our proper distribution system within Gaza.
Some trucks carrying aid have entered Gaza from Egypt today and a separate aid convoy has left Jordan for the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile,