Israel on Wednesday reopened a key crossing with the southern Gaza Strip for humanitarian aid deliveries after it was shuttered days earlier following a deadly Hamas rocket attack.
The move was made after the White House said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised President Joe Biden during a call Monday that he would reopen the Kerem Shalom Crossing.
Four soldiers were killed and 10 were wounded in the rocket strike from Gaza on a staging ground near the crossing on Sunday.
The Hamas terror group claimed responsibility for the attack, which according to the Israeli military, was launched from an area near Gaza’s Rafah Crossing with Egypt.
The Defense Ministry’s COGAT liaison unit said Kerem Shalom Crossing was reopened Wednesday morning for trucks to enter Gaza, per the “directives of the political echelon.”
COGAT said that the aid trucks, which come from Egypt, undergo Israeli inspection at Kerem Shalom before entering the Strip, as they have in recent months.
The Rafah Border Crossing, meanwhile, remained closed as Israeli forces operated there.
The Israel Defense Forces said Tuesday morning that it had seized Rafah Crossing in an overnight raid, in what the military called a “pinpoint operation” against the Hamas terror group.
The ground incursion into the eastern part of Rafah came after Jerusalem said a truce offer from Hamas the previous day did not meet its demands, and announced that it had okayed moving ahead with the long-threatened offensive in the southern Gaza city.
An Israeli official told The Times of Israel that it was a “limited operation” aimed at pressuring Hamas to accept a deal.
Rafah Crossing, located some 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Israeli border, along the so-called Philadelphi Corridor separating Egypt and Gaza, had also been used to deliver aid trucks, following Israeli inspection.
As of Wednesday morning, Rafah Crossing remained closed due to IDF operations in the area, security sources said.
On Tuesday evening, the IDF said it carried out a drone strike against a rocket launcher in Rafah that was used in an attack on Israeli border communities.
Twelve rockets were launched at Israel in the attack, with the Iron Dome air defense system downing five of them. The other rockets hit open areas, causing no damage or injuries, according to the military.
The launcher in Rafah was hit within an hour of the attack, the IDF said.
In another attack on Tuesday, the IDF said six rockets were fired from the Rafah area toward the Kerem Shalom Crossing, which was still closed at the time. No injuries were caused in that attack.
“The projectiles that were fired toward the area of the Kerem Shalom Crossing are preventing the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement Tuesday.
While crossings in the southern Gaza Strip had been closed amid increased military operations and Hamas attacks in the area, Israel’s Erez Crossing with the northern part of the Palestinian enclave has remained open in recent days, with COGAT reporting Tuesday that some 60 trucks were transferred via the crossing that day.
The US military has also completed construction of a floating pier off the coast of central Gaza to serve as another point of entry for aid, but weather conditions were making it unsafe to move the two-part facility into place, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.