What the media isn't reporting is that Israel approved a similar plan in December - and it was rejected by the Palestinian leadership.
In November, Cyprus proposed a very similar plan to send aid to Gaza via ship. They made an agreement with Israel to have the goods inspected in Larnaca and from there sent to Gaza, bypassing the alleged bottlenecks of Israeli inspection on land.
In December, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen led Israeli teams who discussed with their Cypriot counterparts the technical details of how such a plan would work. “Cyprus and Israel, together with other partners in the region are promoting the initiative for a secure maritime corridor to facilitate the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza in an organized and well inspected manner,” Cohen said at the time.
Israel was ready to get the plan moving. It put spent many hours into working on the logistics. Cyprus was ready to get going. (In February, Israel said it was willing to build a floating dock north of Rafah to facilitate aid by sea.)
The Palestinian government rejected the idea.
“We objected to the sea corridor agreed upon between Cyprus and Israel,” Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told his cabinet. “This is because we have suspicions that the ships operated by Cyprus could be used to remove our people from Gaza.”
In this one statement, the Palestinian government in Ramallah spurned not only the idea of massive amounts of humanitarian aid arriving by sea, but also the idea (that no one even mentioned) of allowing Gazans to flee a war zone should they so desire. They want Gazans to stay in a dangerous place, against their will, more than they want to avoid their going without food.
This episode shows that Israel cares far more about the well-being of Gaza civilians than the Palestinian Authority.
The world media is simply not willing to report a story like that.
So they don't.
